They opened the doors of the Old south Theater around midnight last Saturday and three thousand yards of seersucker rolled out. exam period ennui and a revival of the dozen year old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers performance in "Top Hat" combined to pipe half of Harvard over the river and into Boston.

The half that stayed home ought to make the trip while it still can. Astaire and Rogers assure any musical of success. When you add to them the comic talents of Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, and Helen Broderick and the music of Irving Berlin ("top Hat," "Isn't This a Lovely Day to Be Caught In the Rain," and "Dancing Cheek to Cheek") it's like insuring the Rock of Gilbraltar against erosion.

With the latest picture by the same team, the "Barkleys of Broadway," playing just a block away the invitation to comparison is a little too strong for this department's will power. Normally twelve year's experience and technicolor ought to make the "Barkleys" a better picture. They don't.

Musical comedys, like vacations, were better before the war. They were a let more amoral and meaningless and thus unencumbered, they were free to be musical and comic.

"Top Hat's" plot, if you can call it that, never stops Astaire from going into his effortless dance. There are only enough complications to pad the entertainment out to ninety minutes and let the dramatics fall where they may.

In the more modern picture there is hardly enough dancing to whet the appetite. To make matters worse for the "Barkleys" Ginger Rogers took her interim foray in serious acting so serious as to attempt to portray Sarah Berahardt reading the Marseillaise. This is about the aesthetic equivalent of Jimmy Durante playing Abraham Lincoln at Get-tysburg.

Then too, the score for "Top hat" is way out of the league of the newer music. But the real difference between the two picture is that in "Top Hat" the slick sophistication of Astaire and Rogers dominate the show; in the "Barkleys" it hardly survives the smothering effects of a sentimental vulgarity almost implicit in the term musical, "extravaganza."

Nature may be fine, but at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, it appears they gotta improve on it.