Word: harmless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...battery-operated device called the "Electreat" for giving a harmless electric shock. Before the manufacturer was enjoined by the Food & Drug Administration, "Electreat" was represented as helpful for goiter, kidney trouble, heart pain, broken bones, childbirth paralysis and deafness. Price: $19.50. Sales: 4,000 a year...
Ordinarily, Shanghai's "Heavenly Voice" radio station has no more harmless or popular broadcaster than its funnyman, Hsiao Kuai-leh (Little Happiness). But about a fortnight ago, as the price of rice continued its upward hike, a big unhappiness fell upon Little Happiness. Into Heavenly Voice's microphone he sang a song entitled The Bloodsucking Rice Worms. It ran like this...
Tenting Tonight (by Frank Gould; produced by Saul Fischbein) is one of those harmless, agitated, anxious-to-please little comedies that loom big only in their blundering. It concerns a bunch of former G.I.s who can't get into a jerkwater college because they cannot find a place to live. They high-pressure a kindly prof into letting them make a flophouse of his living room; but a big-shot trustee gets mad at the idea. Then they soft-soap a racketeer into turning a building he has leased into a dormitory instead of a dive. But the trustee...
Some of the picture is harmless but not specially interesting fun. A lot of it is considerably better than that. Vera-Ellen, who has never had much acting to do before, makes her love affair more real, individual and touching than most ingenues manage even in nonmusicals. Singer Dick Haymes also plays his role for a good deal more than an excuse to break into song. Miss Revere and Messrs. Naish and Romero are much more human, too, than musical films are supposed to require; and Celeste Holm adds a welcome dash of lemon juice...
...satire of Bostonism takes still another dilution of commercialism in the film adaptation of a play that was a good novel. Progressively each of the interested parties have taken Marquand's Apley and twisted him into an inscrutable New England patriarch (the play) and now into a harmless old crone whose inner conflict is no greater than the woes of a lovelorn son and daughter. Not only is George Apley altered to fit the needs of non-New England audiences, but the aura of Beacon Hill and Louisburg Square is wrenched out of reality and transformed into a cross between...