Word: lena
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...film tells the desultory tale of a dancer (Bill Robinson), from the moment after World War I when he marches up Broadway to the strains of Jim Europe's wonderful band, to the moment after Pearl Harbor when a proud singer (Lena Horne) finally sees it his way and they face the stentorian marriage blessing of Cab Calloway. A great many types of Negro entertainment are represented: some good, some not so good...
...Calloway is more a matter of taste-a haberdashing showman who is bound to worry the discriminating by tearing the passions of jazz to tatters. Lena Horne sings with high lavender virtuosity, and audiences will divide on whether she is truly elegant or merely too refined. Katherine Dunham's pretentious ballet troupe is also likely to split the vote...
Cabin In The Sky (M.G.M.) is an all-star Negro musical with handsome, luscious-voiced Lena Home (TIME, Jan. 4), Ethel Waters, "Rochester," Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Hall Johnson's singers. Like many star-filled pictures, this one never really shows off its crowded heavens. The Negroes are apparently regarded less as artists (despite their very high potential of artistry) than as picturesque, Sambo-style entertainers...
...encouraged by a plot which has a flavoring of The Green Pastures fantasy, but little real resemblance to that subtle and tender masterpiece. The story takes Little Joe Jackson ("Rochester") and his wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) through Joe's moral predicaments, including a nightclub scorcher named Georgia Brown (Lena Horne), on his way to a needle's-eye squeeze into heaven. M.G.M. adds insult to insensitivity by issuing a pretentious screen-print foreword of legend sources and race dreams: "The folklore of America has origins in ... all races, all colors. This story . . . seeks to capture those values...
...Lena Horne and her four-year-old daughter by an early, unsuccessful marriage occupy a five-room duplex apartment in Hollywood across the street from Humphrey Bogart's. In Manhattan Lena lives obscurely in a small room in Harlem's Theresa Hotel. Every day her aging mother makes the trip from Brooklyn to the Theresa to see that Lena eats properly and wears her rubbers...