"The Man Who Came To Dinner" is the funniest movie to come out of Hollywood since Charlie Chaplin abandoned his cane for a social consciousness. It's also so different and original that it's quite apt to gain the rather dubious distinction of being the herald of a new cycle of film comedies.

Slapstick and farce have here taken a back seat to subtle wit and biting satire. Critics who are fond of maintaining that the movie-going public will refuse to take in the sort of comedy that appeals to Broadway audiences are going to find the horse-laugh on themselves here, for the Kaufmann-Hart funnybone-tickler has been lifted almost bodily from the stage and set down in celluloid; and it's just as funny.

"T. M. W. C. T. D."-now due to replace "G. W. T. W."-is the story of the hectic convalescence period of a notorious overgrown child prodigy and man of letters who finds himself forced to spend a few weeks in the home of a harmless Midwestern family who really didn't deserve it. Between efforts to run his unwilling host's family, a prodigious and somewhat weird literary activity, and a passion for making himself disliked, our hero unleashes a stream of wisecracks and stream a mass of bewildering situations that hasn't been matched yet.

Monty Woolley-Alexander Woolcott with a beard-fits his part as perfectly as he does the wheelchair in which he spends most of the film. Better Davis, while she might seem somewhat wasted as the ingenue lead, is pert and smooth as his long-suffering secretary. Reginald Gardner plays Noel Coward better than Coward himself could do it.

The only disappointments are Jimmy Durante, who isn't too sharp as a take-off on Harpo Marx, and Ann Sheridan, who-while she seems built for the part in more ways than one-lacks the oomph that she's supposed to have and which her part demands.

But these are really minor flaws. You'll laugh so hard at the rest of the picture that you won't even pay any attention to what's wrong. Too darn much is right about it for that.