Word: celluloid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...superlatives, however, must be reserved for a British product, one for which the known American descriptive vocabulary can scarcely suffice. Following close on the heels of the unforgettable "Henry V", J. Arthur Rank's "Stairway to Heaven" poses an equally compelling, if less monumental, challenge to Hollywood's celluloid supremacy...
...half ago) and Robert Taylor (whose Song of Russia in early 1944 was his final movie chore before he became a Navy lieutenant, j.g.). The story, by a glossy-magazine fictioneer (Thelma Strabel), was adapted for the screen by a successful playwright (Edward Chodorov) and nursed into celluloid by an able director (Vincente Minnelli). The movie was costumed, mounted, lighted, photographed and scored by MGM's stable of always competent, frequently brilliant technicians. Somewhere along the production line, all this skilled effort went down the drain...
Back in the days when the rubber truncheon was standard equipment on a muddy gridiron, football was the sport of gentlemen-mastodons with handlebar mops hanging over their snarling lips. Slipping out of their four-button sack coats, doffing their celluloid collars, and carefully folding their string-ties, an aggregation would roar out of a gaslit locker-room to pull every play in the book, and some still in manuscript. Grabbing moustaches was worth a slight penalty, but the pile-on, the straight-arm, and an occasional sapping with a clenched fist were all "part of the game." For eleven...
...excellent opening scenes, tight-packed with sharply observed detail, are models of celluloid suspense. Police Detective Thomas Mitchell coldly interviews the victim's neighbors until he tracks down Suspect Olivia de Havilland, hard at work behind her cigar counter. To the detective's consternation, Miss de Havilland has an identical twin. One of the girls was too near the scene of the crime. But the police cannot get a murder indictment without knowing for certain which girl has the unbreakable alibi. The twins themselves aren't talking...
...that's your idea of a good time--carried, in addition to advertisements for "Silk Smoking Caps, Japanese" and "Brier-wood and Meerschaum Pipes, Gambier Bowls, and Toilet Articles," a pen-and-ink drawing of two typical Harvard students ensconced in a gaslit chamber. One gentleman, collared in celluloid, is reclining in a lace-fringed chair, smoking a catarrh cigarette and casually flicking ashes into a brass spittoon. The other is standing firmly before the fireplace, warming the seat of his blue serge pants, and the conversation runs as follows...