Word: dressier
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Cinemas in which Marie Dressier plays the lead have one quality in common-the heroine is a raffish, vigorous old woman whose generous heart thumps under sleazy clothes that do not fit her. Tugboat Annie (MGM) is not merely a typical Marie Dressier picture; it crowns all her previous works because its heroine is even more raffish, kindly, troubled, brave and energetic than the heroines of Min and Bill, Emma, Politics or Prosperity. She is Annie Brennan, whose three excitements are her mischievously drunken husband Terry (Wallace Beery), her handsome, respectable son Alec (Robert Young) and her dilapidated tugboat...
...competent direction. It is entirely because of the presence in its cast of an old lady whose preposterous career makes the happy ending in Tugboat Annie seem comparatively realistic and whose flamboyant character makes the people she impersonates seem pallid reflections of herself. Seven years ago Marie Dressier was an impoverished "bit part" actress, nervously consulting astrologers as to the advisability of opening a Paris hotel in the hope that friends who remembered when she was a famed stage comedienne might patronize it enough to keep her comfortable. Now, at 63, she is indisputably the most valuable performer in Hollywood...
...achieve the ends which he now so skilfully contemns. After a polite upbringing in Boston, he started out at Harvard in 1912, left to study music at the Paris Conservatoire. After composing a symphony of which he says "It was terrible. . . . Have you got an aspirin?" he met Marie Dressier at a party, regaled her with his musical arrangement of President & Mrs. Harding receiving the children for the annual eggroll on the White House lawn at Easter. Marie Dressier put him on a benefit performance bill. Presently he was appearing at the Bat Club in London where Tallulah Bankhead...
...step in the current trend to decentralize studio authority. First official act of Vice President Selznick was to announce an all-star cast, even more prodigious than the one which Thalberg last year chose for Grand Hotel, for MGM's forthcoming production of Dinner at Eight: Marie Dressier, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke, Madge Evans, John Barrymore, Lee Tracy, Jean Hersholt, Louise Closser Hale. Grant Mitchell, May Robson, Karen Morley...
...union workers-film cutters, projectionists, sound technicians, "grips" (property movers), laboratory workers. On the assumption that the unions would accept the cut, the high-salaried employes held meetings of their own and agreed to share their employers' woes, only demanding an audit of studio books first. Cinemactress Marie Dressier wired her acceptance. Writer Laurence Stallings said he was "proud to be the first" to take the cut. Cinemactors Jack Oakie and Stuart Erwin were still arguing when earthquake shook the walls. Both grabbed pens and signed their new contracts. Not until the high-salaried employes had generally agreed...