Young Ideas

When Mary Astor's racy memoirs about life in pre-war Paris hits he best-seller charts, she goes on the lecture circuit. Then she drops off it to marry small-town-college professor Herbert Marshall. Her college-age children, Susan Peters and Elliott Reid move in and conspire to break up the marriage so they can go back to New York.

It's a thoroughly blah MGM programmer, a step up from the Andy Hardy series. It's also very distressing: Marshall and Miss Astor, great performers in pre-code movies, reduced to Code-compliant, sniggering, sex-less sex comedy! Stars and MGM had certainly fallen on artistic hard times.

It is, of course, beautifully produced, directed by Jules Dassin while he was still working off his apprenticeship, and shot in bright, flat light by Charles Lawton, Jr. The competence in service of such piffle makes it even more galling.