Word: charms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...British-boy-meets-American-girl story is told with winning charm. David Niven is the British airman who finds himself falling in a burning plane. By radio, he shouts amorous-poetic speeches (he is certain they are his dying words) to a pretty WAC (Kim Hunter) on the landing field. Then he jumps-without parachute. Incredibly, he picks himself up uninjured except for a peculiar crack on the head that makes him imagine he is a fugitive from heaven. Throughout the film, the camera moves between a clinical study of lovesick Niven's brain disorder and the imaginary heaven...
Adventures by Sea is more curio than classic, but it has the natural charm of a genuine, if unimportant, antique. Coxere (pronounced Coxery) was a cut above the average 17th Century Jack Tar (e.g., he spoke four languages fluently). Like most of his contemporaries, he wrote phonetically-"yeuneuerseti" for university, "yeumer" (humor), "bin" (been), "westinges" (West Indies). Born in Kent, in 1633, he became coxswain and gunner aboard merchantmen whose loads ranged from Newfoundland cod to indigo, currants and muscadine wine. Between voyages: "[I] took large liberty in drinking and sporting as the manner of seamen generally...
...Gillian had long been working up to just such tests. At 17, when her widow-mother could not afford tuition at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Gillian won a scholarship, later got a prize for "grace and charm of speech and movement." At 19, after a swing through the provinces as a speechless Shakespearean lady-in-waiting, she toured the Near East with an E.N.S.A. (Britain's U.S.O.) girl show. Last spring, she got her big break in television...
...siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He commanded a battery of guns at the Fourth Bastion, most exposed point in the city's defenses. Tolstoy wrote the first of his Sevastopol Sketches in a dugout under bombardment. At first he liked the whole thing: "The constant charm of danger, observing the soldiers . . . are so agreeable that I do not wish to leave here. . . ." But before the siege was over he changed his mind. Though he hated physical violence, he beat his soldiers in fits of irritation, and they said they had never known his like for cursing...
...lyrics are neat enough, and the mainstay of two lively ditties, Don't Be a Woman If You Can and Land of Opportunitee; but Composer Schwartz gives you nothing whatever to hum. The dancing is agreeably tame, the chorus is more slight than select, the costumes lack charm and the singing lacks body. Leonora Corbett (Blithe Spirit) and Arthur Margetson (Around the World) are helpful performers but no miracle-workers. Park Avenue never catches the mood, or captures the lure, or achieves the high spirits of genuine musicomedy...