Word: films
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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This cogent and moving episode absorbs about an hour of film. For the next hour Screenwriters Samuel Hoffenstein, Salka Viertel and S. N. Behrman seem undecided what to do for story matter. They fall back on the facts taught in schools about their hero's life. Napoleon divorces Josephine (out of camera range). He arranges to wed Habsburg Marie Louise. Marie Walewska is disgusted. Says she: "'The savior of Europe has become a son-in-law." Not until after the retreat from Moscow does Marie have much more to do with the Emperor, except for bearing...
Victoria the Great (RKO Radio). Shaking from her pretty shoulders the garish costumes of two previous cinema roles-as Nell Gwyn and Peg Woffington -Britain's beloved Anna Neagle last week traced with pomp and piety Queen Victoria's long reign. Because the film is lengthy, because its subject is the most sanctified one in British history, awed critics detoured around its rough spots with wistful allusions to Helen Hayes and Victoria Regina, vaguely said that the picture, presenting almost precisely the same episodes as did Laurence Housman's play, was perhaps about as good...
...film's making, Director Herbert Wilcox stressed authenticity above all things. He borrowed Buckingham and St. James's Palaces, Windsor Castle. He persuaded Liverpool Museum to let him use the original, wheezing train which carried the real Victoria & Albert on their real honeymoon. The Royal Mews let him have the genuine Jubilee coach. He hired Dance Historian Lucile Marsh to puff in advance notices that the film's 19th Century dances were not only authentic, but were direct ancestors of the Big Apple. Miss Neagle herself is said to have culled 40% of the dialogue from...
...true, but the laughter is large, warming and contagious. Stand-in is not an acrid satire like Once in a Lifetime or Boy Meets Girl, but a panel of broad, sure dimensions. It shows the bottom as well as the top, emphasizing that the vast army of skilled film technicians, the grips and pincers, the cutters and carpenters, are more pertinent to picture production than the overpublicized screwballs behind the big desks. Much of Stand-in's authentic atmosphere and crisp character delineation is due to the directing of Tay Garnett, much of it to the writing of Gene...
Hollywood premieres are noted for fancy clothes and phoney congratulations. The first showing of the Department of Agriculture's documentary film, The River, at the little Strand Theatre in New Orleans last week, was marked by plain clothes and sincere praise. What the audience of educators, legislators, literati and plain people saw was a motion picture of startling photographic beauty, sweeping scope and social importance. A swift cinematic history of the vast Mississippi system from pre-Columbian times to yesterday afternoon, an inventory of its bounty and its toll, a report of Government reclamation activity, The River...