GARDEN SHOWER

Essentially feminine, but with a sharpness of sophistication which gives this a certain superiority, this portrays passingly a community near Seattle, of ten homes -- and ten marriages. The incident of an approaching garden party, which Isabel Curtis has arranged for her daughter-in-law, Sylvia, brings into focus the failure of Sylvia's marriage, as too late she decides to have a baby to hold her husband, it brings the whole neighborhood into sharp portraiture. There's Cathy Conover- and Kit- and Cathy's failure to reconcile opinionated, puritanic Angela to her marriage; there are the artists, Leslie and Cary, Cary, whose destructive possessiveness is thinly veiled by his dogged devotion; there are Elsa and Greg Temple,- Greg who drinks and Elsa who nags; then, the Sydneys, Clarke, whose self-mad status interferes with Alicia's social pretensions; there are Barby and Don Lane, who are not finding marriage and parenthood a Good Housekeeping dream- and so on. Behind the prettiness of the garden shower, the niceties of suburban, social life, here are the private marital worlds where handsome is not as handsome does. Obviously for women, but not in the more obvious rental class.