"Hold Back the Dawn"

When Hollywood mixes sweet and inexperienced Olivia deHavilland with Charles Boyer, as a cynical Rumanian gigolo whose past is as dark as his Latin complexion, a strange alchemy results which, with Mexican clime thrown in as catalyst, generates plenty of heat during most of the show, but often just fizzles.

Thrown in with a colony of immigrants who live about fifty feet south of the border waiting for papers into the U.S., Boyer finds he's there to stay because of immigration quotas, far from the sparkling matrons of the New York - Miami set he is pursuing from the Riviera. The only way he can crash the land of silk and honey is to marry an American girl, so disguising his evil design with sulfurous similes and purple passion, he dazzles the dewey-eyed teacher from a sticks town in the States and wins her with a round-the-clock courtship. As we suspected, though, fate plays the trump card, and he falls like a lame duck right into her lap. The plot thickens when a rival strumpet, played to perfection by Paulette Goddard, disillusions Olivia about Boyer's soiled past, but the Rumanian's heart of gold, generated in the nick of time by the Hollywood alchemists, wins the day.

The only reason we'd vote "Henry Aldrich for President" is that we dislike his buddies even more than we do him. Mickey Rooney did the high school trouble-maker up checkered brown and red two years ago and he still beats all rivals.