Word: cockneyism
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...stars England's top singer and dancer, Jessie Matthews, in a jarring $900,000 blend of inexpensive, landscapy charm and budget-eating, Hollywood-inspired bandbox décor. In the ginghamy raiment of a river barge waif, Actress Matthews' sturdy, bike-legged nimbleness seems to belie her Cockney wispyness. But squired to proper-dance frocks and slippers and a fancy stage career by Soup Magnate Roland Young. she dances dainty duos with the U. S.'s Jack Whiting, sings her way to a typical cinemusical fadeout...
...flat racing, but any toffer could ride a nag in a hedgehopping race. Long before last week, however, the steeplechase Grand National had taken its place with the flat Derby as social tops in English horse racing. Into the little marmalade-manufacturing town of Aintree poured 250,000 spectators, cockney sports, peers of the realm, ambassadors, socialites, to witness the 100th running...
...result is occasionally funny, occasionally mordant, mostly an addled mixture. Partly atoning for the commonplace writing of The Greatest Show on Earth are its ingenious costumes, handsome production, and the acting of Edgar Stehli as Slimy, the serpent. As he slithers among the bears and elephants, hissing in Cockney, inciting Leo the Lion (Anthony Ross) to murder the Keeper, Actor Stehli commits only one zoological error. He wickedly nickers his tongue to show malice. Real snakes, without malice, flicker their tongues to smell...
Three adventurers-a discredited sea captain (Oscar Homolka), a sniveling, cadging, little cockney (Barry Fitzgerald) and an English remittance man (Ray Milland) whose remittances have stopped coming-commandeer a Sydney-bound schooner, deprived of its crew by plague, and set off for South America to sell their stolen cargo and invest in mines. Their fates and that of Frances Farmer (a studio addition to the passenger list) are determined by a stop-over at an uncharted South Pacific island ruled with a rifle by a religious madman (Lloyd Nolan...
Stevenson's story is common knowledge. Suffice it to say that Oscar Homolka, as the liquor beridden skipper who lost his ship and his papers while suffering from overmuch tipping of the bottle, is at times excellent and at times downright boring. Barry Fitzgerald, as the disreputable cockney, almost holds the picture up on his own shoulders only to damp it by horribly overacting. Ray Milland and Miss Farmer supply the love interest, but neither get very excited over their emotion; in fact the former does not know how to walk on the screen, let alone act. As a mugger...