Movies will be rated from one to four exclamation points (!) recording to merit.

! ! ! !--Risk court martial to get to these.

! ! !--Worth three hours of any man's liberty.

! !--Okay if you don't want to spend much on date.

!--For civilians only.

"Shadow of a Doubt"

at the RKO Boston

! ! !

When the unenviables who grind out ecstatic blurbs for the movie ads came to "Shadow of a Doubt" they must have been relieved. For this is one length of dective film which they can call "gripping," "tense," and "suspenseful" without prostituting their presumably artistic souls.

The plot is standard stuff: two detectives try to prove that a seemingly, respectable man visiting undoubtedly respectable relatives is a widow-strangler from back East. The unusual and compelling thing about the picture is the tension set up as Theresa Wright slowly sees that her uncle, Joseph Cotten, is no god on wheels, but a pursued murderer.

By his juxtaposition of Theresa Wright's high-school-senior naivete and Cotten's unhurried purposefulness Director Hitchcok achieves completely terrifying effects. And the dialogue, written by Thornton Wilder and The New Yorker's Sally Benson, is one of the most lifelike and convincing of many seasons.

"They Got Me Covered"

at the Keith Memorial

! ! ! !

Monty Wooley is funny because he throws rocks at little children; Dorothy Parker is funny because she didn't go to Vassar; but Bob Hope is funny because everything he says or does or thinks turns out to be a boomerang, with him at the gag end. In Sam Goldwyn's latest celluloid, Hope has Leonard (Flyman Keplan) Ross' script to play with, and it turns out to be much more spontaneous any of the slightly forced travelogue series.