Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the weekly trade magazine The Billboard front-paged some corroborating statistics. Three major labels, Columbia, Mercury and MGM, devoted the largest part of their summer releases to modern works, e.g., Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Elliott Carter's The Minotaur. With several other companies contributing, 50 contemporary compositions were released this summer. This brings the impressive total of 20th century compositions on records to some 1,500, with about 240 composers represented. By comparison, there are only 776 works represented by 48 composers of the first half of the 19th century...
High Society (MGM) is simply not top-drawer. It should have been. The formula was sound: add music and color to a tested product, in this case Philip Barry's old hit, The Philadelphia Story. Producer Sol Siegel assembled a Who's Who cast. He talked Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra into teaming in a movie for the first time, snagged the services of Grace Kelly for her last screen appearance before embarking for Monaco, paid Cole Porter a reported $250,000 for his first original movie score in eight years, and hired Louis Armstrong to blow...
...Fastest Gun Alive (MGM) misfires before it is clear of the holster. The gun (a frontier-model .45) belongs to Broderick Crawford, a hulking fellow with itchy fingers and the single-barreled aim of killing any man who claims to be quicker on the draw. But even as he drills a slower man out in Silver Rapids, a blind seer mocks him: "No matter how fast you are, there's always somebody faster." Crawford like to have strangled...
Somebody Up There Likes Me (MGM) is the sort of Lower Depths that Maxim Gorky might have written had he been born a 20th century American and learned philosophy from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Based on the "autobiography" of ex-Middleweight Champion Rocky Graziano (as ghosted by Sportswriter Rowland Barber), the film begins and ends with a treacly title song ("Yes! Somebody up there likes me; Whatever betide me. he'll comfort and guide me, And stand beside me right or wrong . . .") throbbingly delivered by Singer Perry Como...
...Catered Affair (MGM) is another Bronx cheer, more affectionate than derisive, for the marital problems of the lower middle class. Like the Oscar-winning Marty (TIME, April 18, 1955), the film was originally a TV play by Paddy Chayefsky, the troubadour of the tenements, and it has much the same shirtsleeved intimacy and gamy humor...