Word: guardsman
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...Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is apparently a new kind of double-feature picture. It has the title and some of the music of Oscar Straus's 33-year-old operetta, The Chocolate Soldier. For libretto, it has the plot of Ferenc Molnar's 30-year-old play, The Guardsman...
These two tried-&-true shows, excellent by themselves, together make up a sapless hybrid. Particular stumbling block is The Guardsman's plot: the predicament of an actor who, to satisfy his wife's yearning for amorous adventure and to satisfy himself that she is faithful to him, dresses up in the uniform of a guardsman and tries, hoping he will fail, to cuckold himself. The demands of this ticklish situation (used by M.G.M. with minor changes) are simply beyond the histrionic capacities of the picture's two principals: wholesome, husky Risöe (rhymes with Pisa) Stevens...
...music doesn't fit the plot, and vice versa. The fun of The Guardsman was that the audience never found out whether or not the wife knew it was her husband all the time. M.G.M. makes it painfully clear that she knows it before the picture is half over. The lilt of the Straus score fails to come through the wayward story...
Urgency. Many a draftee, many a Guardsman called to service on the premise that the U.S. needed an Army in a world filled with aggression has now no sense of imminent national danger. (At a Mississippi camp last week uniformed men booed newsreel shots of Franklin Roosevelt and General George Marshall, cheered a thumbnail speech by Isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson...
Married. Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford, 20, sixth and youngest of the beauteous daughters of ex-Appeaser Lord Redesdale; and Lord Andrew Cavendish, 20, Coldstream Guardsman, second son of the Duke of Devonshire; in London. Sister Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, appearing publicly for the first time since she returned last year from a visit to Germany with mysterious bullet wounds in her neck (TIME, Jan. 15, 1940), attended-by a side door...