Word: hoofer
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Died. Jacob Grant Hollenbeck, 72, assistant passenger traffic manager for the Missouri Pacific Railroad (he had retired 24 hrs. before his death) and father of frail, graceful Musicomedy Hoofer Clifton Webb; in St. Louis...
...drama of worldly types caught on a remote mountain in Europe as war breaks out all around them. There is the villainous munitions manufacturer and his actress mistress, formerly a vaudeville performer in America and now posing as a Russian Countess. Clark Gable represents the cabbages as Harry Van, hoofer and friend of the Countess. The tone of Sherwood's play has been lowered to suit the taste of the multitude, and a happy ending weakens the plot. But this is one the whole a superior picture...
Ginger Rogers' precocity was not confined to her stage career. At eleven, she played a piano solo of MacDowell's To a Wild Rose in a Fort Worth auditorium. At 17, she married a vaudeville hoofer named Edward (Jack) Culpepper. Ginger left Culpepper three months later, divorced him, married Hollywood Actor Lew Ayres in 1935, separated from him the same year. At present unattached, she lives with her mother in the highest house on Beverly Crest, in Beverly Hills...
...year two Manhattan producers-Michael Todd and Alfred de Liagre Jr.-were planning separate swing productions of The Mikado on Broadway. When the Federal Theatre decided to bring its own production East, de Liagre bowed himself out, but Todd, charging WPA with obstructing private enterprise, accelerated his plans, engaged Hoofer Bill Robinson for the title role. Promptly the Federal Theatre closed its show in Chicago, last week opened it-three weeks ahead of Todd's-in Manhattan...
Luckily the leading parts are not so affected by Hollywood cutting as are some of the minor ones. Clark Gable, as the philosophical hoofer, Harry Van, gives one of the best performances of his career, since the part is ideally suited to his happy-go-lucky Americanism. Because she modeled her Russian Countess entirely too much on Lynn Fontanne's characterization, Norma Shearer is not so successful. Her Irene lacks the spontaneity of Gable's Harry Van. Yet with all its short-comings, "Idiot's Delight" is sustained by its immediacy of theme and powerful conflict of points of view...