New Picture

The Glenn Miller Story (Universal). One summer evening in 1939, three teenage girls in Philadelphia were listening so raptly to Glenn Miller's record of Moonlight Serenade that they failed to observe a fire in the house until a fireman rushed in to put it out. Bandleader Miller has been dead since 1944, when a plane carrying him to Paris--he was an Air Force major touring military posts with his band--went down in the English Channel. But millions of feet his music once made itchy will surely itch again at the mention of his name, and carry their owners off to see this picture.

The faithful will not be disappointed. The Glenn Miller Story is what the boys in the band business call a "sax lead" (a straight, sentimental pitch), but it is also a creamily competent film biography in which even the Technicolor is as lush and mild as a Glenn Miller arrangement.

Like other movie stories about the lives of famous entertainers, the picture has three problems: to 1) find somebody to impersonate the entertainer who not only looks like him but can act like him too; 2) inject a little drama into the dull routine of success; 3) follow the facts of the subject's life without bringing on a libel suit.

The drama in this case is provided by suggesting that Miller's efforts to get a good combo together were really rather like Beethoven's early struggles. The problem of the actor is solved with a beautiful piece of sustained mimicry by Jimmy Stewart. A subtle makeup job has slightly altered his mouth without causing it to seem unlike Jimmy Stewart's. With that for a start, Actor Stewart has managed all along the line--in walk, talk and conducting--to effect a graceful compromise of gesture that should please both Miller's public and his own.

Musically, the picture offers a reminiscent run-through of almost all the old Glenn Miller favorites (In the Mood, Chattanooga Choo-Choo, Pennsylvania 6-5000, Tuxedo Junction, Little Brown Jug), though Louis Armstrong, playing a pie-eyed piper in one scat session, may make the audience wish for a few wild minutes that this were Armstrong's story and not Miller's.

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