Word: flibbertigibbet
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...performances range from good through ragged to corny. Carnegie Hall's makers evidently tried hard not to mangle, and they recorded considerable stretches of the music, rather than cinema's customary flibbertigibbet tatters. Even so, two hours of this kind of frenzied anthologizing, however well meant, are exhausting. It is often said in defense of such musical popularization that it serves to interest many people in good music who might never otherwise learn to care for it. It might also be suggested that the effort could frighten many potential music lovers away...
Dona St. Columb, though of the 17th-century English noblesse, has a soul the simplest of women will understand. Love's tide has ebbed, leaving her stranded high & dry with two children and a dim flibbertigibbet of a husband (Ralph Forbes) who seems almost to encourage his wolfish crony Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone) to lick his chops at her. Dona is sick of London's mad social whirl, sick, sick, as she tells her husband, of "the stupid futile life we lead here." Finally, one dawn, she packs up and flounces off with her children to their country...
...this case is Stonewall Elliott (Fred MacMurray), who lost his ancestral home when the bank foreclosed and sold it to a young Manhattan sportsman, Norman Williams (Stirling Hayden). They become two corners of a four-cornered triangle. The other two are Stoney's wandering wife, a man-crazy flibbertigibbet (never seen in the flesh) who once had an affair with Norman, and Charlie Dunterry (Madeleine Carroll), a Southerner reared in the north who comes back to have a look at her family homestead...