Evening star., 1945-10-04

time was ripe to kid the daylights
out of his colleagues who approach
the musical as if it were the mos
momentous thing in the universe
outside of possibly the atomic bomb
Or the Russian foreign policy.
BY its very devil-may-ca sim.
plicity, SHADY Lady" insinuates
itself into your outer affections as
something you have been waiting
for too long.
Its mockery of the colossal is OBJ.
vious in its casting. Universal's mar
Wagner, on what must have beer
a happily wayward day in his life
ran into Ginny Simms and Charlie.
Coburn and decided they would be
just the pair to pit against the elab-
crate star clusters to be found in the
usual musical. Nothing could have
been an odder fancy, but it worked
out quite all right Shady Lady
will not WOW you, but in its cock
eyed, casual way it will divert you
for good so minutes.
" X X
Like most of its ilk, Shady Lady
has virtually no story, but unlike
them it admits that lack frankly
1t offers you, on the contrary, a
look at some agreeable characters
engaged in what appears to be a
grinning satire on the usual cinema
musical plot
There is Miss Simms, for instance.
She can sing, not like Flagstad, to be
sure, but pleasantly enough. Her
presence in the cast requires night
club setting. Happily enough, it looks
like night club you might run into
some night, not one of those i'm.
plausibly huge limitations of a bat
tleship or the rumpus room of a
palace in Graustark. That alone
gives you kindly feeling for Shady
Lady"
Then, there is Coburn. Offhand it
would seem the silliest thing in the
world to make him the male lead in
muSical-a musical being sent out
into the world to compete with
others that fairly reek with glamour
males of various talents All Coburn
can do, of course, is act. And by the
time he gets through acting the
role of a roguish old card sharp
you find yourself wishing that other
musicals also would use actors now
and then.
1t is that way all the way through
SHADY Lady" dab of stuff here,
nonsense there, and a song by Miss
SimmS when it seems expedient to in
terrupt the carefree movement of it
with touch of vocalization. There
Is one production number which is
elaborate enough to make you think
for a minute that Producer Wagg-
ner has forgotten he is kidding. but
it does not last for long. 1t is a trick
he is playing on YOU,
x X x x
The greatest single inspiration
which came upon the makers of the
new musical at Keiths is one that
actually occupies just about two
isolated minutes in the story.
1t is passage in which the hero
and heroine, Robert Paige and Miss
Simms go out into a garden for a
flash of WOO, only to be interrupted
by one of the funniest men the
movies persistently overlook, Joe
Frisco. Frisco plays a tramp who
walks up behind the bench on which
the lovers are sitting and in
benevolently philosophical way tells
them love is for fools. He makes a,
pretty good case of it, too. More
Importantly, he makes one of the
most laughable sequences any one
has bothered to put in a cinema
musical this season.
Frisco, who gets along without
his famous stutter, has nothing else
to do with the picture. He just
pops in for this sequence and then
sidles out as surprisingly as he en-
tered. 1t is wonderful, however, to
have had him around for even so