Cinema: The New Comedies

Make Mine Mink (Rank; Continental). Terry-Thomas is a minor British comedian with a mouth like a disappointed mail slot, gaunt but somehow flaccid cheeks, cavernous eye sockets containing soggy blue objects that look as if they had sat all night in a glass of water, self-energizing mustaches, and a gap between his two front teeth that has earned him a reputation in English restaurants as a man who can eat peas with his teeth clenched. He has mastered the wax-fruity manner of the pushy little pip-pipsqueak, up from dreary digs, who would dearly love to be accepted as an old-school-tiehard, but inevitably smacks more of the pub than the club; and since the war he has done an admirable succession of non-U turns as a sort of half-inflated Blimp.

Now at last Terry-Thomas is rewarded with a starring role in a suitably dotty but amiable bit of British nonsense, and he carries it off with his usual weedy charm and blithering idiocy. He is cast as a retired major who shares a flat in Kensington with three maiden ladies (Athene Seyler, Elspeth Duxbury, Hattie Jacques) while together they subside regretfully into "the teatime of life." What to do with themselves? Suddenly one of the dear old things has an inspiration that could lend vast new dimensions to the science of geriatrics: Why not organize a crime syndicate and devote the profits to a Worthy Cause? "Splendid!" cries the major, and in absurdly elaborate military detail he proceeds to plan an assault on the gang's first objective, a fur shop. Naturally, everything that can possibly go wrong goes as wrong as possible, but somehow the charitable criminals manage to creak home with half their haul—the other half is absentmindedly left in a taxi. Stumbling and bumbling from success to hilarious success, the mink mob is soon established as the despair of Scotland Yard and the hope of innumerable philanthropies—including the police orphanage. At the fade, four suspicious characters, dressed in the Renaissance knickers worn by guards in the Tower of London, can be seen slouching purposefully toward the Crown Jewels.

"I say!" says Terry-Thomas as he spots his glittering objective. "Jolly good show!" It is indeed.

The Grass is Greener (Grandon; Universal), as a London play, was a champagne comedy pressed from one of Britain's choicest sour grapes: those beastly aggressive, filthy rich Americans. Such regional decoctions ordinarily do not travel well, but this one is conveyed to the U.S. public by Gary Grant, who could pour the stuff in a hair net, cross the North Atlantic in a rowboat during a polar gale, and never lose a bubble.

Grant plays a British earl who has opened his stately home to public visitation at half a crown a head. "An Englishman's home," his wife (Deborah Kerr) observes cheerily, "is not only his castle.

It's his income." But sometimes she finds it all a dreadful bore: living in a museum, knocking about in county tweeds, keeping the upper lip stiff as she rakes a fresh batch of manure into those horrid little mushrooms in the cellar.