ENTERTAINMENT

Movies will be rated from one to four exclamation points (!) recording to merit.

! ! ! !--Risk court martial to get to these.

! ! !--Worth three hours of any man's liberty.

! !--Okay if you don't want to spend much on date.

!--For civilians only.

"Shadow of a Doubt"

at the RKO Boston

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When the unenviables who grind out ecstatic blurbs for the movie ads came to "Shadow of a Doubt" they must have been relieved. For this is one length of dective film which they can call "gripping," "tense," and "suspenseful" without prostituting their presumably artistic souls.

The plot is standard stuff: two detectives try to prove that a seemingly, respectable man visiting undoubtedly respectable relatives is a widow-strangler from back East. The unusual and compelling thing about the picture is the tension set up as Theresa Wright slowly sees that her uncle, Joseph Cotten, is no god on wheels, but a pursued murderer.

By his juxtaposition of Theresa Wright's high-school-senior naivete and Cotten's unhurried purposefulness Director Hitchcok achieves completely terrifying effects. And the dialogue, written by Thornton Wilder and The New Yorker's Sally Benson, is one of the most lifelike and convincing of many seasons.

"They Got Me Covered"

at the Keith Memorial

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Monty Wooley is funny because he throws rocks at little children; Dorothy Parker is funny because she didn't go to Vassar; but Bob Hope is funny because everything he says or does or thinks turns out to be a boomerang, with him at the gag end. In Sam Goldwyn's latest celluloid, Hope has Leonard (Flyman Keplan) Ross' script to play with, and it turns out to be much more spontaneous any of the slightly forced travelogue series.

In "They Got Me Covered," Robert is lecherous, cowardly, boastful, screw-whacky, and undoubtedly the worst reporter that ever pounded Dorothy Lamour's typewriter. He had special tips on Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Quisling--but forget to cable "Amalgamated Press" about it because he was snooping for bigger news. When the picture opens, Germany has just invaded Russia, and Hope is the only loreign correspondent who missed the scoop. He sent back work that it was all a nasty rumor. Amalgamated recalls him; fires him; and he spends the remaining reels exposing a nest of Gestapo agents in our nation's capital, strictly in spite of himself.

But it isn't the action that makes "They Got Me Covered" a five-star, on-the-nose, A-1 priority laff fest. Give me Groucho Marx for slapstick and Charlie Chaplin for pantomine. No, Hope is best when he is talking. He has a microphone personality and a master-of-ceremonies approach. Unlike your fat-and-thin combos (Abbot & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Maxwell & Winchell), with Hope the ceremonies themselves don't seem to matter. Nobody cares what this quipping correspondent is doing; they just want to hear what he has to say about the situation. And from this point of view, "They Got Me Covered" has two advantages over previous Hope vehicles: Miss Lamour is content to be infrequent and supporting; and there is no Bing Crosby (lovable though he may be) to take up precious feet of fun.

"The Black Swan"

At the Paramount-Fenway

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"Yankee Doodle Dandy"

At the Metropolitan

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"Random Harvest"

At Loew's State-Orpheum

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"Gentleman Jim"

At the U.T.

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