Nobody is surprised to find Keenan Wynn amiable and funny, Lucille Ball tough and funny, and Esther Williams in a bathing suit in "Easy to Wed." Nor is it a jolt when ahs and ohs and girlish sighs accompany the first appearance of Van Johnson and reoccur at unpredictable moments throughout. The big surprise is that the story itself, far from being a B plot dressed up in technicolor, abounds in first-rate humour and develops with steady interest to the madcap climax.

Johnson, typecast as a man no woman can conceivably resist for long, isn't resisted for long by either Miss Williams or Miss Ball. He ends up married to Miss Williams, but not without a brief intermediate marriage of convenience, cooked up by Wynn, to the red-head. In one of the neatest speeches of the year, Miss Ball yells her red head off about being the goat of it all, and Wynn comes to the rescue, thus balancing off the foursome. The economic motive is present, too, in the form of a two million dollar libel suit which starts the whole thing going and disappears just in time for the happy ending.

A few concessions have been made to the bobby sox brigade. Johnson gets too cute at times, much to the brigade's delight, and the slapstick isn't always up to Shavian standards. But you don't have to be a bobby-soxer to enjoy Johnson's plight on his first duck-hunting trip, and constant adult laughter at the many good gags drowned out the most ambitious concerted squeals the soxers could muster last night.

M.G.M. has made much of the fact that Miss Williams and Johnson sing and dance in "Easy to Wed." Both are competent, neither will crash the Crosby-Astaire zone. The better of their two dances is accompanied by Ethel Smith on her organ, while the other has Carlos Ramirez following them around and breathing Latin love lyrics down their neeks.

The second feature, as usual, boasts poker, murder, men with overcoat collars up around their necks, and seedy looking women masquerading as sex-appeal. The title is "Deadline for Murder." The picture concerns a deadline for murder.