Some like it hot and some like it cold, but just about everybody ought to like "The More The Merrier" which is alternately both but always entertaining. The picture is nil if judged by any standards other than those of amusement; it has no particular message, nor do artistic criteria appear to enter in save to make the bits of humor more appetizing. But the picture is such a marvellous vehicle of entertainment that, especially during this particular period of the season, the tariff is more than repaid.

The drama has, as its main excuse, the housing shortage in the nation's capital. Jean Arthur manages to look very prettily flustered as the patriotic tenant who rents half her apartment to one Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn). Dingle's inordinately long nose perceives that his landlady is far from satisfied with her fiance, Charles J. Pender-gast (Bruce Bennett), an effectively sickly-looking Washington bureaucrat. So Dingle sub-lets his half of the apartment to a "fine, clean-cut, high-living young man," Joe Carter (Joel McCrea). By the Hollywood law of mutual gravitation, the two are drawn together and the result is the usual ending, although a little more drawn out than is usual.

Jean Arthur, at 37, still is unexcelled at the art of portraying pretty young things; none of Hollywood's starlets can come within a whoop and a holler of her perfection. McCrea, whose "hand-somest pair of masculine legs" are revealed in all their pristine splendor for feminine onlookers, is strong and silent surpassingly. Bennett is good--surprisingly good in a thankless role. But the honors must go to Charles Coburn, whose portraiture of an elderly busybody is convulsingly funny while it ties the picture together. The scene in which McCrea gets his arms around Miss Arthur after five minutes of trying exceeds Hays' Office standards by a wide enough margin to make it interesting.