The Moviegoer

"A Connecticut Yankee" is the kind of film which you either view with mild amusement or dislike roundly. This is because it is culled from an excellent book and some people, finding the picture not up to the stratospheric standard of the book, thereupon turn violently against it. I, being merely a partisan and not a worshipper of Sam Clemens, could still scrape up a few chuckles.

The great flaw in the movie is the music, which is tuneless, mawkish, and worthless. Bing, though a peerless song plugger, is left this time with a carload of goldbricks. He receives adequate and on pitch assistance from his leading lady, Rhonda Fleming, but as we said before, two times nothing is still nothing.

Strangely enough, the comedy sequences are funny in the same way that the Old Howard comics are funny. Observers laugh first because they can spot the gags upwards of a mile ahead of time, and second when they find they were right. This situation arises because Paramount has followed alarmingly closely (for Hollwood) the original Twain work. To be sure, they schmalzed up the beginning and end and threw in a little sledgehammer moralizing in the middle, but they kept their grubby paws off much of the Twain dialogue and all of the comedy situations.

These situations are naturals for a movie, and Crosby, who plays Crosby--I mean Hank Martin--makes capital of them. He is ably assisted by William Bendix as Sir Sagramore, a sixth century Chester A. Riley, and by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the constantly harassed King Arthur.

One Twain sequence, however, is butchered almost beyond belief. The climactic total eclipse scene is so speeded up that the whole affair could easily be mistaken for a small but dark cloud passing in front of the sun. Hollywood, it seems, is so dreadfully afraid of boring its customers that it baffles them instead.