Word: hollywood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Spark plug of the Group Theatre in recent seasons, with his outspoken Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Leftist Playwright Odets took to Hollywood last year, turned out melodrama that veered neither left nor right. That Hollywood has improved the Odets technique is apparent in the swift mounting of scenes, the extravagance of dramatic energy in Golden Boy. That his experience in the cinema has not lessened his power as a playwright of the masses is equally apparent. The Italian family of the play might have been sketched from behind the portieres of its own flat...
...typical shoestring manager, and Jules Garfield, recruited from the lead of Having Wonderful Time, as a wisecracking taxi driver. Despite the handicap of an unbecoming Italian accent, the Group Theatre's veteran Morris Carnovsky is the convincingly pathetic Old World parent, bewildered by a reckless new generation. Hollywood's Frances Farmer, who spent the summer in barn repertory preparing for her Broadway stage debut, was inappropriately cast as "a tramp from Newark," her fresh-faced prettiness belying every tough trait she tried to show...
...That Hollywood influences manners and morals is a fairly prevalent theory. Recent evidence: the Shirley Temple coiffure, Mae West's gusty wisecracks, Holly-wood halo-hats, a break on the rising consumption of native U. S. whiskey. To relate this last-named fact to the cinema involved a statistical triumph of sorts, but the researchers of the Distilled Spirits Institute (formed after Repeal and headed by erstwhile Prohibition officer Dr. James M. Doran) collated the findings of its sober field workers, arrived at the conclusion that screen bibbers were shown drinking Scotch almost exclusively, to the detriment...
...Hollywood's Hays office, the Institute last month complained: "This Institute is, of course, composed entirely of producers of American whiskey such as rye and bourbon, and they feel that an imported product which contributes little or nothing to the economic life of the U. S. seems to be unduly favored. It is not their contention that rye or bourbon should be specified, but that it might be possible to use merely the term 'whiskey and soda' which . . . would, even in pictures with an English setting, be more correct since it is the form the British...
...Awful Truth," current attraction at Loew's State and Orpheum, is good comedy, it is thanks to a couple of gag-writers and not to the creative genius of Hollywood producers. The acting abilities of Irene Dunn have been sorely limited by one of the worst scenarios she has ever been given, and as staunch admirers of Miss Dunn's we are thoroughly incensed...