Word: dolle
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Despite such voices as Robert Rounseville's in the title role, the impeccable playing of Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic, and a charming first act in which Moira (The Red Shoes] Shearer dances as Olympia, the lifelike doll, the bulk of the picture is slow, obscure and pretentious. The script and direction, which borrow from Dali, Cocteau and Cecil B. DeMille, compound the vague symbolism of the Offenbach opera, leave the story line frayed and dangling. Whenever they are audible in the upper operatic range, the English lyrics sound banal. And the much-touted spectacle of Tales...
...comrades applauded lustily and showered Togliatti with gifts. For his adopted daughter, seven-year-old Marisa Malagoli, Genoa dockworkers gave a doll which closed its eyes and pronounced "Peace, peace." For Marisa's father himself, the Genoese donated a grey, five-passenger, 30-knot motorboat ("Fast as any boat in the Italian navy," boasted the comrades). A delegation of Red youth contributed a rowing machine, to help
...movie surrounds Hope with a whole gallery of Runyon types sporting names like Gloomy Willie (William Frawley) and Straight Flush (Jay C. Flippen). Jane Darwell plays an authentic old doll named Nellie Thursday, and Marilyn Maxwell supplies songs and cheesecake as a showgirl reluctantly in thrall to the Lemon Drop Kid. They treat their problems with deadpan earnestness, as Runyon intended them to, and beneath each sharp lapel and checkered vest beats a heart of gold...
...other comic characters are all foils to Falstaff, and many, are treated as caricatures rather than as characterizations. Bardolph, whose "zeal burns in his nose," and Doll Tearsheet, "as common as the way between St. Alban's and London," both get inspired treatment. The other comic characters join vigorously in the numerous brawls, and seem to get a good deal...
...little too late to reflect that "a 'person' is a-man-plus-a-woman; with one or the other absent, there is no person." When Gaunt sees his sex-starved fellow men queueing up for the Miss America Doll (including choice of permeating perfumes), it seems to him that "she" is precisely the "mechanical lust-putty" that they have been hankering after all along-an erotic object chosen solely according to "criteria of eye and ear and nose and touch," devoid of all "personality . . . mind . . . ideas or a soul." It is inevitable, Gaunt thinks, that this lascivious dummy...