Word: grands
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...there was Chee-Chee, the musicomedy made from Charles Pettit's witty, bawdy Son of the Grand Eunuch, which Lew Fields produced in 1928. Lew Fields's son Herb, who wrote the books of several of their early hits, was sold on the Son of the Grand Eunuch, talked Hart into liking it, the two of them talked Herb's father, all three talked Rodgers. Rodgers believes it had the best score he ever wrote, that what killed it was the idea itself: "You just can't talk about castration all evening...
...Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) is one of the least kinetic and one of the most absorbing of cinema's innumerable treatments of the World War. Concerned not with fighting but with respite from fighting, it investigates a group of French inmates of a German prison camp. The prisoners-principally an austere patrician, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), his mechanic, Marechal (Jean Gabin), and a generous fellow, Rosenthal (Dalio), who shares the canned delicacies sent by his rich family-naturally try to escape. Director Renoir, however, builds his plot, not around the success or failure of this enterprise, but around...
Many war pictures have dwelt, for purposes of irony, on the small gallantries of modern armed conflict. Grand Illusion does the same thing, but for a different reason. This time the monstrous irony is war itself rather than the lie de Boeldieu tells to save his friends, the flower that von Rauffenstein places on de Boeldieu's chest after shooting him through the stomach. For the heroics of ordinary war pictures, Grand Illusion substitutes a pastoral interlude when Marechal and Rosenthal try to escape to Switzerland, and a German peasant woman shelters them on her lonely farm. The pastoral...
Superbly acted, with English titles to translate its polyglot dialogue, Grand Illusion's principal defect is that an occasional exaggerated attention to detail tends to retard its pace. It is notable for restoring Erich von Stroheim (a top-priced director until a combination of extravagant pictures and his own erratic temperament cut short his Hollywood career) to the screen in a more sympathetic role than those he used to play. Good shot: the moment at the dress rehearsal of a prison show when the first member of the cast tries on a woman's dress...
...North Sea. Despite its wholly Dutch characters and background, it is only semi-Dutch. Author Dejong, a slight, redheaded, 33-year-old ex-bank clerk, soda-jerker, gravedigger and onetime student at five U. S. universities, left Holland when he was twelve, has spent most of his life in Grand Rapids, Mich. Old Haven tells the story of a picturesque Dutch clan of builders and landowners, headed by a hardheaded, wise old dame who defies strait-laced Calvinist townsfolk by opening a saloon, vents her disgust on a pious daughter-in-law by spoiling her grandson Tjerk. Best part...