Word: deanna
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Metro and Paramount are the most frequent employers of Technicolor. Universal's dabblings, in this case at any rate, descend to color per so. In black-and-white, "Can't Help Singing" would be nothing. Even with Color, music by Jerome Kern, and stiff, conventional acting by Deanna Durbin and Robert Paige, it represents the lowest in a painfully low series...
...Help Singing (Universal) cost $2,500,000 to produce, has a Jerome Kern score, throstle-throated Deanna Durbin, and the evident fine intention of turning out a cinemusical as full of sunlit Americana as Oklahoma!. As such it deserves a pleasant fate, and may earn it at the box office. But it can hardly fare well with critics, even the most generous...
...Deanna hasn't successfully graduated from the teen-age singing sensation stage, with the possible exception of "The Amazing Mrs. Holliday." And from Mrs. Holliday to Christmas Holiday, the proof is fairly conclusive that perhaps the wistful and appealing warbler should stop trying to graduate, turn over a new leaf, and start warbling all over again. Or perhaps you like the wistful type--and maybe you like Kelly's broad Irish smile. In any event, they don't belong in a psychological chiller-diller-thriller...
Apart from the fact that Kelly looks like he's dying to break into some of his very excellent dancing, and Deanna into a tender encore of the very hummable "Always," "Christmas Holiday" has its tense and effective moments. Gale Sondergaard delivers a spine-tingling performance as the aristocratic matriarch of an old New Orleans family, trying to keep her bad little boy from going around murdering people and otherwise disturbing the Creole peace. Richard Whorf portrays the liquor-loving newspaperman in just the right tones of big-time tenderness...
...Girl, Great Waltz, Lady Hamilton, Mission to Moscow. (TIME'S Moscow correspondent reported that, at its first showing, Moscow audiences found parts of Mission to Moscow slightly comical.) Kalatozov also said that Russia's favorite U.S. cinemactors are: Bette Davis, Charlie Chaplin, Spencer Tracy, Deanna Durbin, Mickey Mouse...