"Boy Meets Girl" is a recklessly silly satire hurled against that great helpless brute, the cinema. The movies for several years now have been offering their humble deference to the older sister, in the form of receiving players and plots, and the haughty stage has been responding with scornful excoriations. The stage's chief tenet is that anyone really a part of the celluloid industry must perforce be moronic.

It was that way last year in "Personal Appearance". And new in "Boy Meets Girl" the illegitimate stage, or at least one studio of it, is made to repose all its hopes for artistic expression in an illegitimate baby. After a trying attack of measles, this gallant little trouper called happy becomes a has-been at eight months. But one must not take Happy as a symbol for the movies in general, despite the marked parallels; nothing so subtle is meant.

The humor is of a much lustier breed. Much of it is simply the practical joke. At least one third of the gags, for example, are built about a broken-down illiterate cowboy star's being baited by two mad pranksters, who would seem to be the only two brains in Holly-wood. Roy Roberts, in the role of one of these, probably carries off the acting honors. He represents a scenario writer who would much rather be back in Vermont writing a book of the soil, and who consequently treats his associates, especially the cowboy and the preposterously pedantic boss, with highly amused condescension. His greatest coup is the bringing to prominence of Happy and Happy's mother. Mario Brown in the part of the latter throws some new light on the art of being an ingenue. She gets into some very messy mixups, but remains refreshing and panies actors and audience alike by her completely casual way of recounting her experiences.

If, after first-night clumsiness, the technicians manage to get the inserted scraps of hilarious movies running right, and if nothing funnier comes along, this frivolous little tidbit, should do well enough.