Word: neffe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...over Levantine cunning. On one side are ranked wholesome Terence Morgan and his fellow painters (Derek Bond and Paul Rogers); on the other looms the hypnotic Svengali (oldtime Shakespearean Actor Donald Wolfit). who drifts about the screen in tattered clothes, rather like a grounded crow. In between is Hildegarde Neff, who makes Trilby, the Irish artist's model, exactly the "great, beautiful, stupid cow" of a woman that Du Maurier intended...
Silk Stockings (original Broadway cast; Victor LP). The new Cole Porter musical (TIME, March 7). Its sophisticated rhymes bring Ninotchka's old joshing about Bolshevism up to date, and a couple of songs (All of You, Without Love) are pleasant enough. Don Ameche sings passably, if emphatically. Hildegarde Neff and Gretchen Wyler sing emphatically...
...fanatical Soviet woman commissar-who on a mission to Paris responds to French life and American love-there are brighter lines than in most musicals. There are two or three good Cole Porter tunes, and now and then a good Cole Porter lyric. As Ninotchka, Cinemactress Hildegarde Neff is exotic and pleasing enough to get by without a voice; as Ninotchka's Hollywood agent of a beau, oldtime Cinemactor Don Ameche has an excellent voice and everything else to match. And late in the evening, a Moscow jam session achieves a gay abandon that the show, by then, needs...
Right down the line in the production good things are cancelled out by bad. Hildegarde Neff, a Marlene Dietrich with a bigger frame and a smaller voice, was the only cast member who managed to make the script worth her while. But though there should be few complaints with Miss Neff, Don Ameche plays opposite her, as an American who turns her head and ideology. There are somewhere, I am sure, people who enjoy Mr. Ameche and his teeth. They will be gratified to see that he approaches a song with the same enthusiasm with which be extolled coffee...
...given a little material assistance by Porter; he had descried her in the first act with "There's A Hollywood That's Good," resulting in a number several cuts under the lowliest College musical filler. Had the authors done their share, Miss Adair could stop the show and Miss Neff could keep it going...