Word: nickelodeon
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Author Crowther retells the familiar story of how the ambitious son of Russian immigrants parlayed ownership of a Haverhill, Mass, nickelodeon into the Hollywood eminence that earned him the highest salary in the U.S. for seven years in a row ($1,139,992 in 1943). What makes the biography unusual is the gossip columnist's relish with which normally dignified Critic Crowther rummages through Mayer's private life...
...substitute mere method for point of view. Jean Kerr's daisies bloom more bountifully in suburban soil than in Broadway asphalt. And early bang-bang Westerns and supercolossal Near-Easterns have not only had their tales pulled all too often, but also time and television have made the nickelodeon a cherished relic like the model T, fitter for nostalgia than satire. Out of early films Goldilocks fetches up some indulgent laughs, but never any period lure. And Goldilocks rather fits the formula it at one point joshes: it is "first of all a love story, a tale...
...silent movie bit is good for some wonderful parody sequences and some elegant, expensive Peter Larkin sets. Unfortunately, it also provides the Kerrs with an opening for an improving lecture on the cultural mission of the nickelodeon, by way of proving that a movie-director hero is not "a common, on-the-make hustler," but an idealist and an artist. For my money, he's still a common, on-the-make hustler, loaded with moral earnestness in an attempt to season a piece of high-quality hackwork with maladroit and dubious "social comment." (This pseudo-moralism is the second-worst...
...prospered briefly with a Fillmore Street nickelodeon, ran shooting galleries, arcades, three-for-a-quarter photo shops. Finally, he bought an interest in a Tenderloin district poker club, bucked his own game and ended on his uppers...
Honky-Tonk in Hi-Fi (Westminster). For the nostalgic or the audiophiles who collect memories or sounds as far out as the nickelodeon. The wheezing specimens at the Musical Museum at Deansboro, N.Y. rattle and plunk out antiques such as Waiting for the Robert E. Lee and The Sheik of Araby...