Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Runnin' Wild (Teddy Wilson and the All Stars; MGM, 8 sides). Old favorites such as Bugle Call Rag, Stompin' at the Savoy, I Surrender Dear, well played by the pixie-fingered professor (of jazz piano at Juilliard School of Music) and such cohorts as Trumpeter Buck Clayton, Vibraphonist Red Norvo. Not too well recorded...
Singing in the Rain (MGM) reunites Dancing Star Gene Kelly and Producer Arthur Freed of the Academy Award-winning An American in Paris with a screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who wrote Kelly's highly successful On the Town. The result, though pretty and tuneful, is not so opulent as the first, nor so inventive as the second...
...decided at the conference that Quo Vadis will open this fall-at advanced prices-in theaters the world over (it is now playing only in the U.S. and London); MGM's home-office agents will personally supervise exploitation, e.g., parades of vestal virgins, chariot-borna gladiators charging through the streets. M-G-M has decided against using the Colosseum for the Roman premiere of Quo Vadis. Acoustics and lighting conditions are just not up to the picture...
...Belle of New York (MGM) lets Fred Astaire dance on just about everything from a horsecar to thin air. In fact, the picture itself is mostly thin air. It is a Technicolor trifle in which Astaire, a turn-of-the-century playboy, falls head over dancing heels in love with Vera-Ellen, a mission worker who also dances. Revivalist Vera-Ellen saves Sinner Astaire, but not all their fast stepping can quite save a plodding picture. This pretty period piece is punctuated with a few chuckles provided by Marjorie Main as a Park Avenue dowager and Keenan Wynn as Astaire...
Love Is Better Than Ever (MGM) works at a strenuous little plot about a dewy-eyed New Haven dancing teacher (Elizabeth Taylor), who is out to hook a blase Broadway agent (Larry Parks). In the course of her campaign, she 1) annoys him by publicly announcing their nonexistent engagement, 2) gets him tangled up in a troupe of twirling moppets at a dance recital, 3) taunts him with being a "flesh peddler." Elizabeth Taylor, ineptly striving for comic form, reveals a photogenic figure, but Parks falls flat on his farce. Completed early in 1951, Love Is Better Than Ever...