The New Pictures

The Mating Season (Paramount) only proves what many a cinemagoer has long suspected: Thelma Ritter can be just as delightful in a big role as in the small ones she played in A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. She is funny, enormously likable and the only genuine article in this highly synthetic comedy. Without her, the picture would founder, and it is hard to think of any other actress now working in movies who could bring off this particular salvage job nearly as well.

Actress Ritter's uncommon talent is for the common touch. She wields it this time as the down-to-earth mother of a social-climbing junior executive (John Lund). When Lund marries a diplomat's daughter (Gene Tierney) and lands in her circle of snobs, he cannot bring himself to break the news that his mother slings hash in a Jersey City hamburger joint. He stays tongue-tied when Bride Tierney hires Mother Ritter as the family cook, keeps his secret even after his uppity mother-in-law (Miriam Hopkins) moves in and starts loading his mother with chores.

Though this plot idea leads conveniently to some amusing complications, it is a lot to ask an audience to swallow, even with Actress Ritter to make it palatable. Bravely insouciant, cracking wise until she finally cracks the whip, she dotes too much on her son to expose his shame, goes about instead captivating his bride and his boss (Larry Keating) and foiling the mean schemes of the boss's playboy son (James Lorimer). At times, the story pushes her role uncomfortably close to Stella Dallas; even then, she indicates that, properly used, she has a talent for pathos as well as comedy.

As the first movie from Producer Charles (Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend) Brackett since Paramount split his partnership with Billy Wilder, The Mating Season is a disappointment. Among its contrivances, it tries to palm off Lund as a sympathetic character, an effort that fails despite the script's broad, last-minute gestures. Star Ritter gets most of her help from Actress Hopkins' expert playing of a bitchy lady of quality. There is also a surprisingly animated performance by Gene Tierney.

Target Unknown (Universal-International) models itself on one of World War II's most entertaining U.S. Army training films, Enemy Interrogation. Like the original, it shows how a guileful German intelligence might have plucked scraps of information from many captured U.S. flyers and pieced them into a forecast of Allied plans that the captives themselves knew nothing about.

Colonel von Broeck (Robert Douglas) and his operatives ply the flyers (Mark Stevens, Alex Nicol, Don Taylor) with hospitality, prod them with bluster and, when advisable, brutality. They get what they want by playing on the Americans' individual strengths and weaknesses: regional pride, naivete, cockiness, loyalty to each other. The picture's exposition of enemy intelligence tricks and U.S. airmen's gullibility is so carefully rigged that it makes the Germans look clever enough to have won the war hands down. But it is still absorbing stuff.

Unhappily for Hollywood purposes, the Army film did not run to feature length, confined itself tersely to pointing up the importance of keeping mum when captured. The new movie pads its borrowed plot fore & aft with moldy melodramatics. Thus, the flyers now repair their loose-lipped indiscretions by escaping and getting a warning back to England, with the help of a curvesome mademoiselle and a stock-company French underground.

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