Word: concertina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Department message to a dead soldier's mother; Ulysses' & friends' raid on a forbidden apricot tree; the pursuit of Tom Spangler by a rich young pretty (Marsha Hunt); Bess and her girl friend picking up three lonely soldiers; Marcus playing hymns on his concertina in a troop train. The sum total of these screen adventures never quite attains the soaring enthusiasm of Saroyan's novel, and some of the preaching is hard to take. Yet at its best The Human Comedy is immensely moving. Even its preaching sometimes achieves an eloquence that gives the picture...
Charlie Chaplin had no musical training, cannot read a note. But he plays the piano well for an amateur, the violin and concertina very well. Chaplin composes by humming, whistling or playing his themes on a piano while someone takes his tunes down. For The Great Dictator, his first picture in which he avowedly needed help, Composer Chaplin thought up most of the tunes, in part or in whole, let Composer Willson do the rest. One sequence, a variation on an old beer-garden waltz, begins when Actor Chaplin is hit on the head by a frying pan, which...
...acts as a still. The breath of the performer (and your breath) is a watery vapor. Remember the mist it makes when blown on a cold window pane? The coils of the horn distill out most of this water. . . . All wind instrument players (except organists and operators of the concertina) suffer from this horrible inconvenience but they do not drool while they play. Shame on you! or did I say this already...
...piano accordion. Last year piano accordion sales took second place only to piano sales, accounted for $19,000,000 worth of business. There are at least 400,000 piano accordion players in the U. S. Their instrument, a more complicated and efficient descendant of the old-fashioned concertina, is really a small piano keyboard grafted on to an accordion...
...justifies himself in the second act with a most unusual and amusing novelty. With the spotlight focused on a black table top, he causes two fingers of each hand to move so that they give an exact imitation of the more popular dance styles. Raphael, the well known concertina player, has, under his French plumber's exterior, the soul and talent of the lighter and more dazzling classics which stop the show for numerous encores. The Rocky brothers dance lightly and spiritedly with their comely partner, Helen Gray, and Pils and Tabet sing several very funny songs with delightful zest...