Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...only Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan), a kindly, bungling old carnival seer. But the resourceful Professor has a bit of homely chicanery for each of his applicants, gives them all what they desire. No children's tale is Hollywood's Wizard of Oz. Lavish in sets, adult in humor, it is a Broadway spectacle translated into make-believe. Most of its entertainment comes from the polished work (aided by Jack Dawn's expert makeup) of seasoned Troupers Lahr, Bolger and Haley...
...smoking-room stories with which politicians and even professors give "meaning and significance to otherwise unwieldy subjects." She suggests that parents and teachers recognize the educational value of children's folk literature, that writers for children use it as a model. Says she, sagely: "[Children's] humor involves a laugh at the simpleton. But perhaps children love the simpleton better than the wise...
Significance. Strangest fact about Miss Ravenel's Conversion is that it has been forgotten for so long. Battle scenes like the storming of Port Hudson are superior to those of Stephen Crane; the humor, bewilderment and passion of Miss Lillie make Hawthorne's and Cooper's damsels seem moral abstractions. Although, in its 466 pages, the book sometimes seems labored, and antiquated asides slow down its fast story, De Forest's wit picks it up, springs out in the plain talk of soldiers, his comments on the appallingly dull conversations of people in love...
...falls in love with Julie Eden (Miss Lombard), a widowed commercial artist who has taken a summer cottage near his stately country seat. For, as rarely happens in screwball comedy but is very likely to happen in life, Alec has a tenacious wife with an undeveloped sense of humor, parents who also thought infidelity no joke. Before Lovers Grant and Lombard fight through to the clear, they have traded more punches than puns, emerged with the realization that matrimony is more than the off-screen ending to a Grant-Lombard movie...
...MURDER THAT HAD EVERYTHING-Hulbert Footner-Harper ($2). Among thinly disguised members of Manhattan's café society, Lee Mapin, a snuff-taking amateur, solves the murder of a glamor girl's gigolo fiancé. Merits: humor and action. Fault: not too plausible...