Word: devil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...musical has nothing to do with the old. Its casual plot describes the attempt of an oldtime Hollywood hoofer to get a foot back on Broadway as the partner of a temperamental ballerina. The show they are rehearsing is a sort of boogie Faust, and there is the devil to pay in the form of an overemotional producer (Jack Buchanan). Also on hand for some mild laughs: Pianist Oscar Levant, whom Hollywood seems to regard as inevitable a backstage fixture as the fire bucket...
Clergymen of the area tend to blame such doings on religious apathy. "Church customs have mostly become hardened forms of hollow traditions," says Pastor Wolfgang Baader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. "He who does not believe in God must fear the Devil." But though authorities shake their heads at witch talk, they shrug their shoulders over what to do about it and point to the case of Farmer Bading of Lüneberg Heath. Hannes Bading called in a witch doctor to fix up his ailing stock, his failing crops, his drying well. The Hexenmeister sold him some "letters from...
...this point, desperate enough to swallow the first kind word he heard, Gunzburg agreed to let a fantasy merchant named Arch Oboler (once known in the radio business as "the daytime Norman Corwin") make a movie called Bwana Devil in Natural Vision. "The truth is," says one moviemaker, "that the movie industry didn't have the sense to follow its own nose into 3-D. They had to be led by a dog." And Bwana Devil-which may prove to be the most important motion picture produced in Hollywood since The Jazz Singer introduced sound in 1927-was indeed...
Nevertheless, Bwana Devil had what it took. Three-D had arrived. The next morning a half-delirious theater manager was shouting at Gunzburg over the telephone: "It's the most fabulous thing we've ever seen! They're standing four abreast all the way down to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood and all the way around the block downtown!" In its first week Bwana smashed house records at the box office, rang up $95,000 at the two theaters. Rushed into a Chicago theater, it broke some more records...
Some of the other sequences are much better. Envy, adapted by Director Roberto Rossellini from a Colette story, is the intriguing yarn of a newlywed wife, who is jealous of her husband's affection for his pet cat. Pride, directed by Claude (Devil in the Flesh) Autant-Lara, is a mordant study of an impoverished, aristocratic mother and daughter (well played by Franchise Rosay and Michele Morgan). The best episode is Gluttony, a Rabelaisian sketch written and directed by Carlo Rim, about a handsome doctor, who seeks shelter during a storm in the home of a peasant. There...