Word: charming
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Brink (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) exercises his literally fatal charm on old Gramps' son and wife, but the old man (Lionel Barrymore) proves a tougher customer. Gramps puts Mr. Brink up a tree until he can figure out a way to keep his chubby-legged little grandson, Pud, out of the clutches of grasping Aunt Demetria. Pud is safe from Aunt Demetria when Mr. Brink climbs down...
...carbon copy, not a sequel, yet not entirely a fresh and uninfluenced cinema, Daughters Courageous has a coltish, unaffected charm, considerable wit, an ill-concealed admiration for its two picaresque but impossible male mainstays. Not calculated to stir up too much emotion, one scene in it will nevertheless bring goose-pimples to many a tough-bearded male. The scene: the girls, barbering their stepfather-elect, shaving downwards over his Adam's apple...
...thing, the show has a lot of dependable talent: the amusing, if less than Bea-Lillie, drollness of Luella Gear; the Gallic, if less than Maurice-Chevalier, charm of Jean Sablon; the dazed, middle-aged prankishness of Bobby Clark ("I'm Robert the Roue of Reading, Pa."); the borderline sanity of Abbott & Costello; the magic bartending of "Think a Drink" Hoffman, who turns water into not only wine, but dry Martinis, Pink Ladys and piping hot coffee...
...second half From Vienna did much better. There was fun in a sketch of a refugee learning English in Six Easy Lessons; fun and charm alike in Little Ballerina, where dainty Ilia Roden plays a daydreaming ballet pupil who quits her routine to imitate Mary Wigman, Pavlova, an Aquacade swimmer. And the finale was a potpourri of those gay, nostalgic Viennese tunes to which all the world has waltzed and to which it is impossible to goose-step...
Moved to adoration by scatterbrained, widowed Lavinia Brandon's charm were the vicar, his greensick pupil and his middle-aged churchwarden. That their adoration remained dumb was due to Lavinia's blissful inability to concentrate long enough to hear them out. Nevertheless they could try to protect her from each other, from Aunt Sissie's money, from a pesky lady folklorist home from Italy, and from the consequences of her own kind deeds. Only her two grown children appreciated how little protection Lavinia needed. In the end, when her witlessness and her ability to muddle through...