The New Pictures

Kathleen (Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer) brings back to the screen Shirley Temple, now almost 13, an inch and a half taller, ten pounds heavier since her retirement almost two years ago. The dimpled little actress, who has made about $2,000,000 for herself in her nine screen years, has become an appealing young lady of quiet charm and impressive assurance.

But the picture which her new employers assigned her was called The Poor Little Rich Girl when Mary Pickford played it in 1917. It was called the same thing when Miss Temple breezed through a more modern version five years ago, for 20th Century-Fox. Now it's Kathleen, unhappy daughter of a widower (Herbert Marshall) who neglects her, the rebellious charge of a governess who maltreats her. Of course, Miss Temple rights all wrongs by getting rid of the governess, of her father's butterfly fiancee (Gail Patrick), and by marrying daddy off to her nice new governess (Laraine Day).

This apparent attempt to build Miss Temple into another "America's Sweetheart" looks like waste of a tidy talent for emotional acting. Shirley Temple is by no means awkward, as her age implies. She now has a pleasing voice and smile, nicely self-contained manner, and a better acting technique than many of her adult Hollywood confreres. In Kathleen she seems obviously embarrassed at the inanities she is asked to perform.

Ball of Fire (Goldwyn; RKO Radio) is saturated with some of the juiciest, wackiest, solid American slang ever recorded on celluloid. The plot is not as fresh as its idea, but the picture will do until its producer, swivel-tongued Samuel ("Include Me Out") Goldwyn, wins his own lifelong race with the English language.

In the encyclopedia, slang comes under the letter S, and it is there that Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) and his seven unwed colleagues get stuck. Potts takes pencil and notebook and sets out to get unstumped. He is lucky; he meets Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck).

Sugarpuss is a lady who jives by night--a sort of songster-stripteuse in a nightclub. Unable to communicate his plan for syphoning off her jargon, Potts eventually gets his message across after being told to "shove in your clutch, Professor."

Although it is "the first time anyone ever moved in on my brain," Sugarpuss turns out to be just what the encyclopedists need. They discover that the bed each of them has been sleeping in is a snoose, that long-time-no-see is just Indi an corn, that "stick close to the Ameche" means mind, the telephone, etc. Yum-yum, however, upsets the entire establishment. Sugarpuss demonstrates it to Professor Potts, and they wind up married.

Actor Cooper plays his Mr. Deeds role with the authority of long familiarity, and Miss Stanwyck (once Ruby Stevens, of Brooklyn) is equally at home in hers.

Like Professor Potts, Scriptwriters Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder took time out for research. Among the oddities they unearthed was one"Muggsy" Meyers, race-track tout, who refers to himself as a "ducat hustler." From Muggsy and associated sources, the scripters found to their dismay that in 1941's "jellybean jargon" a country boy was no longer a yokel, but a "loose tooth"; a dollar, no longer a buck, had become a "banger"; "cooking with gas" meant perfect understanding.

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