The New Pictures

You're Never Too Young (Paramount) stars the overworked team of Martin & Lewis in the same overworked plot. This time. Dean Martin is a teacher at a girls' school and Cutup Jerry Lewis is a barber's apprentice.

Comic Lewis is at his best when he is wildest: he gives a fine take-off of a choral conductor, dances insanely, impersonates Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart. Partner Dean Martin is better as a straight comic than as a singer. Otherwise, as the team goes through some tired slapstick movie routines, e.g., a chase on water skis, moviegoers may conclude that Martin & Lewis are headed for the fate that befell Abbott & Costello: all they do is make money.

How to Be Very, Very Popular (20th Century-Fox) is a standard recipe whose one surprise ingredient is sauce, supplied by Broadway Kootch-Dancer Sheree (Hazel Flagg) North. The film was written, produced and directed by Nunnally (How to Marry a Millionaire) Johnson, which practically guarantees that it is fast, light and pleasantly funny.

The story: Stormy Tornado (Betty Grable) and Curly Flagg (Sheree North) are a couple of down-at-the-G-string chorines. The star of their show. Stripper Cherry Blossom Wang, surprises every body by getting herself bumped off. and Stormy and Curly, having seen the murderer, take off to hide. They pick the men's dormitory of a small college. The academic atmosphere is charged with excitement. Sheree is accidentally hypnotized by a student--and remains in that state for most of the picture. Betty cuddles up with an overage student (Robert Cummings) who stays on in school because his grandfather's will provides for his education but sets no time limit. Student Orson Bean falls in love with Sheree, and School President Charles Coburn sets out to woo Bean's millionaire father ("He's been in the East somewhere," says Coburn thoughtfully. "Arabia. Persia, one of those Yvonne de Carlo countries").

Educators have every reason to shudder at the outrageously cynical characterization of the college president. Betty Grable as a shrewd blonde carries most of the acting load. But Sheree North -- who looks every bit as good from the south and every other point of the compass -- is the major attraction. Though her dumblonde role calls for few lines, Dancer North, in a few blistering numbers, tosses her torso around with the speed and precision of a super-rocket. As Hollywood's newest guided miss. Sheree ought to be very, very popular.

The Man Who Loved Redheads (Lopert; United Artists), a droll British legpull, poses a profound question: Can a comfortably married man -- in this case, a slightly stuffy peer with a fine future in the Foreign Office -- pull the sheets over his wife's eyes by carrying on with a string of mistresses, and live happily for 30-odd years in his two worlds? Answer: rather.

The nobleman is John Justin, who has been chasing a face all his life--the ideal face that belonged to Sylvia, a pretty little redhead to whom he plighted his puppy love when he was a schoolboy. Now a respectable married man, Justin accidentally runs into the face. It is not Sylvia, but Daphne, a cockney working girl, who has the same face. Though Justin never really gets very far with Daphne, he decides to go all-out as a playboy on the side--fictitious name, private quarters, a cloak-and-bull story about his job as a secret agent. Justin's dozens of mistresses are all the image of Sylvia, but the film examines only the affairs with Daphne, with Russian Ballerina Olga ("I know you secret agents are poorly paid . . . Some of my closest friends are spies"), and with Dress Model Colette.

Whatever laughs Writer Terence (The Winslow Boy) Rattigan can get out of this situation, the actors quickly milk dry. As a result, there is hardly enough to sustain the story for 89 minutes. Justin is a peerless blade, and his crony, Blimpish Roland Culver, is a good foil. Ballerina Moira Shearer has a field day playing Sylvia, Daphne, Olga and Colette, and she is all to the good. She also gets to dance some Sleeping Beauty, but clean and sharp as it is, a ballet performance looks peculiar in a bedroom.

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