Word: doll
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Wild Duck, coming after the season's brilliant revival of Ibsen's A Doll's House (TIME, Jan. 10), was just as disastrous as The Merry Wives in exactly the opposite way. Underplayed to the vanishing point, it left the audience wondering whether they had lost their hearing or the actors had lost their voices. With the pace a solemn largo, The Wild Duck, possibly the greatest play in the modern theatre, might have got by as a genteel pantomime had there been any gestures...
...Cole Porter music, a P. G. Wodehouse plot, Clifton Webb's versatility, Lupe Velez' high spirits, Libby Holman's low register, You Never Know has sex & sophistication, somewhat less breath & bounce. Riding high are Velez and Webb as a manservant and lady's maid who doll up in their employers' togs. Libby Holman, featured in the billing, is slighted in the show...
...ball rolling by having her teacher fired. Thereafter, the dear old Goldwyn-rule days give way to the usual mad, noisy, illiterate, shyster antics of the movie industry. Maddest, noisiest, worst illiterate, biggest shyster is a movie magnate (Robert H. Harris) who looks as sinister as a Kewpie doll, acts as honorably as a double-crossing spy, throws telephones across the stage, never lets his right-hand man know what his left-hand man is doing, hires, fires, wheedles, fondles, gives his office the dignity of a bargain sale...
Approaching the awkward age, Shirley is not quite so dewy as she used to be. Paced by the dark veteran, Bill Robinson, through two simple tap routines, one to a pleasing tune called Toy Trumpet, she seems something more than a doll, something less than a little girl. Her singing, almost free now of the lilting lisp that has three times made her No. 1 Oh-&-Ah cinema champion (TIME, Jan. 3), sounds much like that of any little Sunday-morning radio aspirant...
...line to the Far East to cash in on the publicity value of the daily Sino-Japanese headlines. More worthy of note than its short-order plot are: 1) its resourceful utilization of the newsreel shots of the Shanghai bombing (TIME, Sept. 13); 2) its hopeful experiment with doll-like, undistinguished June Lang (real name: Jane Vlasek) as a beautiful-but-dumb comedian; 3) its commanding hero, 6 ft.-3 in. George Sanders. Russian-born of British parents, Sanders made a great stir in his first Hollywood role, as the foppish Lord Stacy in Lloyd's of London. Immediately...