MOVIEGOER

Pictures featuring Eddie Brakcen are always anticipated with a vague premonition of dismay. They are attended with little comfort, and leave a feeling of general despair afterwards. In view of this, why does anybody ever go to pictures featuring Eddie Bracken?

"Hold That Blonde," infested with both Bracken and Veronica Lake, supplies two answers to this question. In the first place, it is a source of endless pleasure to see Bracken hanging by his finger tips from about the eightieth floor of a New York skyscraper while his hands are pounded by a drunk with a cane. The tragic outcome of the scene (Bracken doesn't fall), while anticlimactic, fails to take the edge off the prospect of his immediate and horrible death.

In the second place, Bracken is probably the only actor in Hollywood who is clumsier, more foolish, and more completely ineffectual as a lover than the average American male. But (here's the significant point) he always gets the girl. Think of the hope this stirs in the hearts of the male population.

In this particular picture Bracken is a kleptomaniac, and Miss Lake gets mixed up in the proceedings, along with the Romanoff diamond necklace, in a complicated manner. Dozens of gangsters run in and out, and a psychiatrist who looks like one of those wartime Germans with glass eyes makes a brief but impressive appearance.

These, essentially, are the ingredients. The have been stirred, boiled, and basted into a pretty unpalatable dish. Why does anybody ever go to pictures featuring Eddie Bracken?