Word: obvious
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Scarlet Street (Diana Productions-Universal) is an ambitious melodrama bristling with fine directorial touches and expert acting. Its trouble is its painfully obvious story. Producer-Director Fritz Lang, frankly trying to repeat the success he had with The Woman in the Window, has used all the stock props of rough, tough melodrama in his new thriller. There is the sneering, dame-slapping heel of a hero (Dan Duryea), the bad girl (Joan Bennett) who asks to be slapped around and seems to enjoy it, and the frightened, henpecked little middle-aged cashier (Edward G. Robinson) with a simple-minded...
...least part of his opposition, it turned out, was composed of men with fair and open minds, or at least men whose motives could not be questioned. Some of the committees which had blocked parts of his program had passed others without a quibble. The villains were not obvious villains...
Desired Results. From a string of other witnesses came stories implicating not merely the obvious organizations such as the Gestapo and SS, but also the then-aristocratic High Command. At one time the Army had ordered executions speeded up because of a food and housing shortage on the eastern front. The secret shooting of recaptured P.O.W.s had been given the professional military label of "operation bullet...
Made to Measure. For "The Primrose," Young Bill Moennig spent a year and a half studying the violist's playing technique, then almost six months shaping and making the viola. Primrose told him: "I want quality with power so that the music will come out without an obvious wrestling match in front of the public." Moennig tried to blend the measurements of a Strad and an Amati, to get the Amati's mellow roundness with the greater brilliance of the Strad...
...rather a pity that such a pathetic exhibit provides a vehicle for Victor Moore. The drab mediocrity of his role which calls for eternal petulance and peevishness makes even Moore become tiring. In the romantic lead, despite his age and figure, is that gay Casanova, William Gaxton; the obvious farce of love scenes between Gaxton and Marilyn Maxwell is sheer hypocrisy. To complete the scene Miss Maxwell hasn't the voice to sustain her in a long role and although she is one of the loveliest women alive today her costumes and heavy makeup never betray the secret...