The Post-Standard from Syracuse, New York • Page 49

FRANK CHAPMAN RAY MILLAND'S perfonnance in the movie of Charles Jackson's "The Lost Weekend" doesn't win him the Academy Award for 1945, then there is, of course, no hope for Hollywood. The Irish-horn Monsoor MiUand makes this teeth-rattling story of a drunk one of the tours de force of all time; he wraps up the picture and carries it home with him in the inside jacket pocket with the fifth of bourbon. Acting like that is knitted in the laps of the gods. Against this razzle-da2zle witchery, the neat but not gaudy efforts of players like Jane Wyman and Phil Terry are swallowed and forgotten hopelessly swamped by the floodtide of emotion that Milland turns loose. But for a few memorable scenes scenes that are tender and, Lord preserve us, Mr.

Milland has some big-league company. This is a dark-haired, high-cheekboned, sexotic piece of baggage named Dorfe playing in the first movie she ever made in her life. Miss Dowling plays Gloria. You remember Gloria. Gloria, the little gal with the husky voice and the garish clothes, who sat around the Third Avenue gin mill with the baldies, wearily helping the old goats spend their money and just waiting for the time she could date Don Bimam, her dream man the drunk.

You remember the date, the new dress, the plans for the evening with the swells and the standup. We should sing of Gloria in the calls of the birds, but what we do la wolf-whistle at the mention of her name. "I didn't want to make Gloria a at-the-heels, worn out, aging old crow," Doris told me as we tried our night school French on the menu at the Chambord. "To me, she was just a kind of nice, easy, loose party girl dumb, used to men and wise in their ways, ready to shift for herself but "not really bad or malicious. "I saw her as a young girl grown up fast.

She was always experiencing strange, adult-adolescent crushes on like Don but she was too dumb to fall in love. It just wouldn't penetrate. She wouldn't know what love was if it hit her. She just had dreams of white knights on horses with lances, or, more likely, movie stars in Packard convertibles. I've known lots of girls like flip, emotional, shallow and somehow sad." In "The Lost Weekend," Doris was permitted by Billy Wilder and Charley Brack-ctt to cut loose with a little of the passion that seems to smolder inside her, but not until "The Blue Dihlia," the Alan Ladd picture not yet released, will the cash customers see her in full blccrr.

as a Baaa-aad Girl. She struts and lures and winks and docs everything but drop a shoulder strap. And she loves it. "That's the kind of part you really can do something with," she said over the consomme. "Critics and movie goers might LbtcLbbki Li BaaanaV aK am -a DORIS DOWLING as a Cocktail Cin-dcrella "too dumb to fall in love." like the ingenues, but th'ey remember the witches.

I want to do a couple of those until I get my feet firmly on the Udder. In a way, Tin glad that Ray did such a terrific job in the first movie I made, because it sort of buries me and lets me climb slowly. If I were good enough to ring the bell the first time out and make the critics click their "FLIP, emotional anil somehow sad." CVnnrlnl.t. 191). Klni MjnilW-ilr, lna The public may like the Inge-Hues bnt It the Kitchen, so this screen new comer trill be a siren by choice heels, I'd be terrified that I couldn't live up to the inevitable buildup.

That's happened not too long ago, you know." It is with intense pleasure that I record Miss Dowling as a New Yorker. Not a native, to be sure, because her parents "maybe to dodge the went to Detroit to have her, but she promptly was rushed back to this last remaining spot of civilization. She grew up on 97th Street with (1) Constance Dowling, a sis-ter, who became a movie actress and gave Doris ideas, (2) Robert Dowling, a brother, who has just finished a novel that will be a magnificent success (quote, unquote), and (3) Richard Dowling, another brother, who seems bent on diving for hidden treasure. Doris was very damp behind the wireless set when she was graduated from Hunter High School, but she whisked into the Fohes Bergere and got out to San Francisco with it before Mrs. Dowling came to life, grabbed her and sent her to Hunter College.

But the die was cast, su we say, and Doris soon got a job at the Belasco Theatre as an with Con- stance. The two gals just brusned away parental objections and ushered like mad for the Group Theatre. "We were lousy ushers," Doris said. "We were always backstage." Buddy DeSylva discovers everybody in pictures, of course, so quite naturally he was up at Ben Marden's Riviera across the Hudson one night when Doris had returned to dancing. Buddy had a fine old time watching a pair of legs all night.

Later, he went back to the girls' dressing room, grabbed a piece of paper and sketched the legs. "Are these yours?" he demanded of Doris. They were. Two months later, Mr. DeSylva's fine Italian hand had established Miss D.

in the musical "Panama and the climb was begun. Two years ago she tied up with Paramount, and the result is history. "Or is it?" she asked me, as she murdered a slab of camembert. "But there are encouraging signs. I was in the Stork Club the other night and a couple of kids who had seen the movie in a soldier camp asked me for my autograph.

I practically tore the cards out of their hands and did everything but write a love letter to them." Doris is New York to the core. Wc were on 49th Street, and she didn't know how to get to 52nd Street. She's fond of Brooklyn but isn't sure whether it's a borough or a state. Her favorite sport is sitting for hours in coffee shops. "Carousel" made her cry.

The day I lunched with her, she wore a mink coat, dark green dress and gold bracsjjt and which gave her that York look that you never find in any other city, alas. And best of all, she Is that an honest siren..