It is apparently a well-established rule that the quality which makes plays successful on Broadway is largely lost when those plays are transferred to the medium of motion pictures. Columbia's adaptation of "Snafu" is no exception to the rule, though it is a more faithful duplication of the original than is usually the case.

Time and again we have seen highly successful comedies based solely on the old stage formula of combining amusing complications and witty wisecracks in a mad merry-go-round of people dashing on and off the scene. For some reason it doesn't work out so well on the screen.

"Snafu" was an amusing, though not too successful farce of the problems attending the involuntary demobilization of a 15-year-old Army sergeant. The movie version has the same plot, the same stock characters, the same gags, and largely the same setting; the changes are in the very beginning and end of the picture, and neither one is an improvement.

Otherwise the picture is the same as the play. The jokes are the same, but they have lost some of the effect that perfect timing gives to a good stage gag. The individuals are mostly up to par, with newcomer Conrad Janis filling the sergeant's shoes quite competently and with the late Bob Benchley suffering nobly as the harassed father. What is most lacking from the current version, however, is that peculiar quality of perpetual excitement and continual building-up of complicated entanglements that makes any farce a successful production. mss