The New Pictures

It's Always Fair Weather (M-G-M), despite its inclement title, is a sunny example of a Hollywood rarity—a song-and-dance movie with enough plot to justify its dialogue and enough needling satire to make some points. Fair Weather's good fellows who get together are Gene Kelly (also, with Stanley Donen, the film's co-director and co-dancemaster), Dan Dailey and feather-footed Michael Kidd, the dancer and choreographer, in his first film role. Returning to the U.S. when World War II ends, the three army pals, mutually jittery about the prospects of renewed civilian life, ricochet up and down Manhattan's sleazy Third Avenue in one of the most ably choreographed binges ever unreeled.

Ten years later the three buddies reunite in their favorite saloon and are shocked to find that their boozy camaraderie of yore is dead as yesterday's glass of beer. Their strained efforts to rekindle brotherly love first produce boredom, then brotherly loathing. Kelly has degenerated into a Broadway fast-buck man who manages a double-dealing prizefighter; Dailey has overblown himself into a slobbish, ulcer-ridden TV idea man; Kidd, the papa of five of them, runs a crummy Schenectady diner specializing in "Cordon Blue" hamburgers.

At this point, the movie cries for woo and woe. Both are obligingly served forthwith. As a knowledge-spouting (her defense against wolves) TV career woman, Cyd Charisse pops up to convince Kelly that, for her sweet sake, he cannot let his fighter take a dive. Dailey also has a crisis: the star of his outrageously successful TV program, Midnight with Madeline (a part that features some fine burlesque by Dolores Gray), temperamentally revolts against her prospective guest of the evening, a Bronx crackpot whose claim to fame is his model of the Taj Mahal, constructed in 16 years with nothing but chewing-gum wrappers. The three ex-G.I.s are unwittingly shanghaied as substitutes for the crackpot, and from there on, Fair Weather breezes on to a stormy climax—a brawl between the good fellows and the bad fight fixers, in full view of 60 million televiewers.

For its superb dancing, inventive musical numbers, witty spoofery of TV's overstuffed brass and mawkish product-hawking of such goodies as H<SUB>2</SUB>O Cola, as well as its spirited jabs and gibes at Madison Square Garden's crooks and pug-ugly environs, Fair Weather rates as one of the top contenders for the year's lightweight title.

The Sheep Has Five Legs (Raoul Ploquin; United Motion Picture Organization) is French Comedian Fernandel's 150th film and a rollicking demonstration of his virtuosity. The Frenchman with the face that has launched a thousand faces has long been a favorite in Europe, but outside the eclectic alcoves of big-city art theaters and the covers of Philippe Halsman's remarkable photographic interview, The Frenchman, he is hardly known in the U.S. Already booked for showing in 33 cities across the U.S., French-made Sheep should at last give many U.S. moviegoers their long-overdue chance to meet Fernandel, and give him the American audience he deserves.