Word: diva
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...scene of "Inspector Charlie Chan" is a luxurious hunting lodge on Lake Tahoe: the characters: a famous diva, her four ex-husbands, her flance, and Mr. Chan. Two mysteries appear and two mysteries are solved, to the satisfactory entertainment of all, but Mr. Harrigan, as the Chinese detective, is pretty consistently embarrassed by his verbal luggage, and the diva's Yale-dictory is more strained than even a diva's valedictory should be. With these reservations, however. Charlie Chan is a recommended evening, a point which might handily be proved if it were not for the management's express injunction...
...line. The drawers stand up and do a buck & wing. A bedspring rises on end. Mickey twangs the strings and it becomes a harp. Anything may take on life and humanity, express itself. A singing bird does its scales like a tyro, gulps, quivers and heaves like a diva, perches on the sheet music on the piano rack and turns the pages. The dog chases the cat through a clothes wringer. Both come through flattened out like sheet iron, go leaping on, smack into a fence which jolts them back into three dimensions. Nothing in a Disney cinema is ever...
Evensong (by Beverley Nichols & Edward Knoblock; Arch Selwyn & Sir Barry Jackson, producers). Glib, ultra-British young Beverley Nichols used to be employed on the personal staff of Dame Nellie Melba. He cashed in on this experience when he wrote Evensong, a novel about a declining diva's race against time. Dramatized and produced in London, the story had a remunerative run. Produced for the first time on a U. S. stage, Evensong again sets one to wondering if the English often go to the theatre just to get out of the rain...
...proverbs. Sample: "Even a blind man, if he has been over the road before, may point out the way.'' This time Author Biggers. whose books make better cinemas than most murder stories, has Detective Chan present at a lugubrious houseparty. Present also are four ex-husbands of an egocentric diva named Ellen Landini. She is the one who gets the bullet. All the husbands are suspected. So are a maid, her husband who liked Landini, a jeune fille whose scarf was around Landini's neck, an old Chinese servant who speaks rudely. A peculiar circumstance : on two cigaret boxes...
...story is a frivolous incident in the career of a Budapest diva. Informed that her singing lacks warmth and emotion, she is glad when she falls in love with a young man who has been observed loitering hopefully near her front door. She visits him at his apartment and succeeds in her frank efforts to have an affair with him. The comedy in this part of the action resides largely in the fact that the opera singer thinks the young man is a gigolo while the audience is sure that he is not. In what corresponds to the last...