Cinema: Also Showing

Four Wives (Warner Bros.) increases and multiplies the joys and sorrows of the four daughters (Rosemary, Priscilla, Lola Lane and Gale Page) of old Music Master Lemp (Claude Rains) in a typical U. S. townlet. This time maternal instinct defeats the considerable ingenuity with which, in Four Daughters, Director Michael Curtiz managed to keep cinemaudiences straight about, and interested in, the doings of four leading characters in one picture.

The consequences of marriage are almost too much for everybody in the Lemp sisterhood. The clinical situation at a glance: Sister No. 1 expects a baby, visits her doctor to learn that she never can have one. Sister No. 2 deduces therefrom that she is in the same predicament, adopts a baby only to learn that she is going to have one, has twins. Sister No. 3 is beyond all reasonable doubt going to have a baby, but its father (John Garfield) committed suicide in Four Daughters. Without waiting for the baby to arrive, she curdles the thickening plot by marrying her unborn posthumous baby's father's rival (Jeffrey Lynn).

As a clincher, Sister No. 4, a maid when the picture opens? falls in love with the doctor who delivers her sisters' babies. Unable to learn anything from experience, the doctor marries her, paves the way for the next projected Lemp picture—Four Mothers.