Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wanted something operatic for Two Sisters from Boston (TIME, June 17). MGM's musicmakers scrambled through the classics. The trouble was, none of the old boys knew how to start an opera right. They had a rousing overture, the curtain rose, and a bunch of minor characters went into some tedious, scene-setting song. What Hollywood wanted was an overture, curtain, and zowie-a tenor aria for Lauritz Melchior...
...Postman Always Rings Twice (MGM) and Gilda (Columbia...
...Sisters from Boston (MGM) nearly knocks itself out trying to assimilate the dissimilar talents of Jimmy Durante and Lauritz Melchior. Set in the Gay Nineties, the picture allows its top-notch cast to dress up in quaint period costumes and poke fun at turn-of-the-century manners. The tortuous plot winds the two pretty sisters (June Allyson and Kathryn Grayson) through such varied backgrounds as a stiff-bosomed New England drawing room, a Bowery honkytonk, an imitation Metropolitan Opera Co. stage in full cry. In spite of its singing, dancing, frenzied movement and fancy dress, Two Sisters adds...
...Bascomb (MGM) presents Great Muggers Wallace Beery and Margaret O'Brien in a fight to the finish. She leads him into paths of righteousness; he in turn leads a band of Mormons towards the Promised Land. Histrionically, the battle is a draw. Typical O'Brien low-blow: "Why does your nose run when your feet get wet? Your feet don't run when your nose gets wet." Typical Beery haymaker: bulging the screen full of a face as massively seamed as a relief map. There is also an Indian raid, during which Miss O'Brien routs...
...once, don't blame Hollywood censorship. Cain's super-sexed passages were the weakest parts of his story, and their removal is not responsible for the animated skeleton that MGM, has produced. Rather it is the inexplicable changes that have been made in the structure of the novel, changes that confuse and obscure the basic thread of love, changes that transform a dynamic series of events into an almost comically catastrophic succession of messes...