Word: arlen
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...FLYING DUTCHMAN-Michael Arlen-Doubleday, Doran...
Green hats "pour le sport and bravely worn" have long since lost their style. But Michael Arlen, who alters the cut of his books at fashion's wink, still has millinery for a stock in trade. "The hats many women wear, even poor women who ought to know better," remarks Johnnie Cloud, narrator of The Flying Dutchman, "are uniformly ugly and idiotic, which is maybe quite natural since, so it's said, fashions for women are made by homosexuals and Lesbians and they don't like women to look attractive...
Johnnie, a U. S. aeronautical expert who in typical Arlen fashion is also the Comte de Saint-Cloud, tells a tale of high adventure in a style which intermittently suggests Ouida, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, E. Phillips Oppenheim and P. G. Wodehouse. Between fashionable adulteries unrolls the story of Johnnie's employer, Chance Winter, an Englishman with world-wide armament connections which he uses to promote the subversive ends of an international secret organization. Suave and ruthless, Winter eventually meets an appropriate fate...
...fours and swinging from the limbs of trees. Naturally, in a picture which contains the Ritzes, there is very little room left for a story. In Straight, Place and Show, Damon Runyon's and Irving Caesar's fairly conventional fable about a young man (Richard Arlen), a young girl (Phyllis Brooks) and an eccentric race horse survives principally as the excuse for two songs by Ethel Merman and a steeplechase climax which, faintly reminiscent of The Hottentot (1920), is one of the most suspenseful and certainly one of the funniest cinema sequences ever filmed at famed Santa Anita...
...social theme.) But social significance ran away with the musical field, providing a tense, pounding strike drama in The Cradle Will Rock, a fresh, spirited revue in Pins and Needles. Best of the straight musicals: Hooray for What!, thanks to the clowning of Ed Wynn, the music of Harold Arlen...