Word: kern
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...dreamboat days of 1925. She was luminous Marilyn Miller, star of an English circus, and she danced and sang her musicomedy way into the arms of an ex-doughboy baritone and the hearts of Manhattan theatergoers. Of no small help to her was the catchy score by Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert's successor and equal, and the lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II. One of their tunes moved the great Critic Percy Hammond to observe: "One song entitled Who? was attractive enough to indicate that ere the snow falls it will be a pest...
...lesson of No, No, Nanette (TIME, Dec. 30), which he made without featuring the musicomedy's best assets, the tuneful score of Vincent Youmans, he plugs Who? for all it is worth. Four different orchestrations deliver it in ballad, tap, choral and semi-rumba rhythm. Three more Kern tunes (Sunny, D'Ya Love Me?, Two Little Blue Birds) are tossed in for good measure...
...legal right to existence; both of them insist on existing anyhow. Josef Steiner is hard and adroit: by cheating at cards he earns the thin security of a dead Austrian's doctored passport, works in a Viennese amusement park until Anschluss drives him to Paris. For young Ludwig Kern life is tougher: no papers, no such talent for moneymaking, an incautious enough heart to fall in love and travel with young Jewish Ruth Holland. Peddling toilet water (illegally) they move from Vienna to Prague, to Vienna, through Switzerland, to France, to Geneva, at times together, at times apart...
...When Kern went into exile, almost a child, he had everything to learn. He learned fast: to live as though he were never going back; to exploit every opportunity ; to pick a lock; to quiet watchdogs; to box; to speak French. He learned also that prison clothes save wear & tear on your own; that a good-looking overcoat, though it puts off benefactors, also puts off police; that trickery, to succeed, must be simple; that the safest places for exiles are churches, museums and police stations; that an exile has three wars to fight, for food, for shelter, and against...
Flotsam has brief incidents, descriptions, and mere casual statements that have the impact and brightness of poems: Kern's exquisite pleasure, under shelter of a fortnight's residential permit, in asking a policeman for the time; Steiners utter lack of interest in the world's news ("For someone swimming under water . . . the color of the fishes isn't important"); the man who stands at a Paris police window seemingly in perfect nonchalance, streaming with the sweat of terror; a magnificent passage in which Steiner watches Germany swing past his train window in the dark; Steiner...