Cinema: Also Showing

20 Mule Team (M.G.M.) contains, in addition to the 20 mules, two Beerys—Wallace and Noah Jr. Wallace is no surprise as a sly, slobbering, guzzling mule skinner employed by a borax company to haul its product out of Death Valley. Leo Carrillo is a big surprise as a pigeon-toed Indian. Biggest surprise of all is Marjorie Rambeau trying to act like a saloonkeeper.

The story is all about borax claim jumping and the love of Noah Beery Jr. for Saloonkeeper Rambeau's spoiled daughter (Anne Baxter). Its sandy wastes are punctuated by one good crack. Says Mule Skinner Beery describing his sire: "He had twelve other sons besides me. I was always the youngest and puniest. Gosh, he was a fine old feller! Never raised a hand to none of us boys—'cept in self-defense." If I Had My Way (Universal) will thrill countless admirers of Singer Bing Crosby by making him the foster father of Songstress Gloria Jean, Universal's 12-year-old laryngeal replacement for rapidly maturing Deanna Durbin. Crosby & Gloria Jean sing Burke & Monaco's l Haven't Time to Be a Millionaire, Meet the Sun Halfway and Pessimistic Character. Alone, Bing Crosby sings ll I Had My Way. This is very easy on the ear, but along with it spectators have to take the Swedish wit, El Brendel, and a story in which, for the sake of Gloria Jean, Singer Crosby abandons the carefree life of a structural steelworker to become a restaurateur. As practiced by Singer Crosby, the restaurant business turns out to be an excuse for a second helping of such old-timers as Female Impersonator Julian Eltinge, veteran Comediennes Trixie Friganza and Blanche Ring, who sings Rings on My Fingers, her song hit of 1909.

Star Dust(20th Century-Fox) is a light-hearted apologia to scores of young hopefuls whom Hollywood calls west for screen tests each year only to send most of them home again. But Hollywood gets so interested in itself it forgets to apologize. More exciting to most cinemaddicts than the plot about the waitress (Linda Darnell) and the chump football hero (John Payne) who click before the cameras will be the game of identifying the Hollywood counterparts of the wicked casting director (Donald Meek), the actor who has superannuated into a talent scout (Roland Young). In the headstrong, somewhat brassy producer (William Gargan), who can't be separated from his sawed-off polo stick, fans may think they recognize a gentle kidding of 20th Century-Fox's Po-loist-Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who is also headstrong, also inseparable from a sawed-off polo stick with which he likes to frighten recalcitrant colleagues during conferences.