Word: curtizisms
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...craft. Most of the gags are pretty thin, e.g., a safecracker trying to open a sardine can and a lady who has lost her left shoe trying to cross a hotel lobby. But chiefly, the slapstick potboiler is saved by unpretentious acting and the leisurely direction of Michael Curtiz...
...Unsuspected (Curtiz; Warner] is suspected too soon by the audience and too late by most of his fellow actors. The result is a long, lame melodrama about a radio star (Claude Rains) whose secretary is the first to be murdered, and various other people, pleasant and unpleasant, who hang around Rains's mansion hounding the culprit, or just waiting their turn. Among those present: Joan Caulfield, Audrey Totter, Kurd Hatfield, Constance Bennett, Fred Clark...
...Works. "For several months," Hedda casually announced urbi et orbi one day last spring, "I have been plugging a young singer named Doris Day, who, I believed, had fine talent. . . . Mike Curtiz tested her for the lead in Romance in High C. She'd never been before a camera previously, but Mike told me her test was sensational. Even so, the studio wanted a star name-Mary Martin, Lauren Bacall, or Ginny Simms-for the role, but Mike held out for Doris...
...struck many screen-wise readers that he was putting on paper a kind of movie that Hollywood would never dare put on celluloid. Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder sensationally proved how wrong that was, two years ago, with Double Indemnity, Ranald Mac-Dougall, Catherine Turney and Michael Curtiz followed up last year with Mildred Pierce, less expert yet crudely exciting. But the screen version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the first, most ferocious and in some ways best of Cain's novels, suggests that the vein is running...
Aside from four (4) regrettably rousing renditions of "Bulldog, Bulldog, Bow-Wow-Wow, E-Li Yale," "Roughly Speaking" is a tasteful bit of expert light comedy. It may have a Boolah Boolah backdrop for nearly one complete real, but in the hands of Rosalind Russell and Director Mike Curtiz it also has gay nonchalance and a touch of Americana in the reminiscent style of "Our Hearts Were Young...