Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Thursday 28 August 1952, page 7


FILMS' CHAMPION MOTHER

MYRNA LOY set a screen record for motherhood in "Cheaper by the Dozen" with her brood of 12 youngsters. But she beats that record in Fox's comedy about the further adventures of

the Gilbreth comedy, "Belles on Their Toes," which comes here this week.

IN the new picture 18 boys

and girls portray the 11 surviving children of her family.

The reason for the larger number playing the dimin-ished family is that there is a prologue and epilogue to the film which show all the children as adults.

For Jeanne Crain, Barbara Bates, Debra Paget, and Robert Arthur, who play grown-ups in "Belles On Their Toes," it was merely a matter of make-up to age them 15 years. But for the juvenile members of the family director Henry Levin had to get seven adult proto-types.

The other stars in the film are Jeffrey Hunter, Edward Arnold, and Hoagy Car-

michael.

The story tells how Mrs. Gilbreth carries on the re-markable engineering career of her late husband, leaving the care of the numerous family to Anne (Jeanne Crain).

Anne's time, however, soon becomes taken up with a romance with a young doc-tor (Jeffrey Hunter), and young sister Ernestine (Bar-bara Bates) develops an adolescent crush for a musclebound footballer.

From there on the adven-tures of the family become as unpredictable as ever.

The period, of course, is the early "twenties," and the film

is in Technicolor.

NEW FILMS

Century: "Belles on Their Toes," comedy sequel to "Cheaper by the Dozen;" Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy.

Esquire: ''Saturday Island," tropical adven-ture-romance in Techni-color; Linda Darnell,

Tab Hunter.

Plaza: "Operation Pacific," World War II adventure; John Wayne, Patricia Neal.

Variety: "Red Moun-tain," outdoor adventure in Technicolor; Alan Ladd, Lizabeth Scott.

Victory: "The Sniper," crime thriller; Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz.

Civic: "Mutiny," sea adventure in Techni-color; Mark Stevens, Angela Lansbury.

* * *

AMONG hundreds of Mal-

ayan, Indian and Bur-mese extras who helped lend authentic touches to "The Planter's Wife," the newly completed Rank film dealing with the trouble in Malaya, was the well-known Burmese painter, Khin Maung.

In his first film part, as a bloodthirsty bandit, Khin Maung makes a realistic at-tempt to stab Claudette Col-

bert to death.