The tip-off to "Mother Wore Tights"--at least to its non-musical moments--comes in its first thirty seconds. Seated in a rocking chair, as the picture opens, and rocking gently to the accompaniment of some Twentieth Century Fox violinists who play that as yet unforgotten song beginning "M is for the many times I've missed you," an old and gray Betty Grable knits while a nostalgic female voice reveals over the sound-track that "there sits Mother." Fortunately, the picture rapidly retreats into the past, showing Mother when, as the title does not quite suggest, she was a vaudeville performer. This puts Betty Grable into some abruptly terminated costumes and allows her to sing and dance, a combination that has made about twenty otherwise unattractive movies into hits. Like its predecessors, "Mother Wore Tights" has a load of good musical numbers, but falls apart whenever its characters temporarily try to behave like reasonable facsimiles of human beings.

Things get a little livelier in the second feature which, if not quite a thriller, at least offers automobile chases, loud pistol reports, and stony-faced intrigue. Entitled "Second Chance," it concerns a projected million-dollar jewel theft, in the course of which two of the crafty schemers fall in love. They double-cross their accomplices, enabling the movie to end on a clinch between two law-abiding citizens.

Probably the most interesting reel on the program is a Pete Smith Specialty showing scenes from about a dozen of last year's football games. In the course of ten minutes, you can see Glenn Davis, Doe Blanchard, Bobby Layne, Charlie Trippi, and others in a series of spectacular runs and passes, nearly all of which go for seventy and eighty-yard touchdowns. Later on, in the newareel a Columbia end called Swiacki catches several passes from a prose position and beats Army. All in all, there is no grid lack at the U.T. this week.