Word: operettas
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...King Steps Out (Columbia) is a Central European romp in which Soprano Grace Moore sings six songs from an old Fritz Kreisler operetta called Cissy. One of the songs, Madly in Love, became more celebrated than it deserved when Miss Moore, who sang it in peasant garb while milking a cow, flounced off the Columbia lot vowing never to return. Said she: "I don't mind milking a cow or two in the course of a day, but also to sing all day is something else again. I have another public besides that one out in Hollywood...
...like Robin Hood, to protect the common people, but solely for bloody revenge. Result is the goriest picture of the year, well-acted, beautifully photographed, but prevented from being a second Viva Villa by its sententious moralizing, its frequent digression into scenes suited only to light operetta...
Rose Marie (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is based on the sound assumption that cinemaudiences will pay little attention to plot and trimmings if they can hear Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in full voice. To this end, Rose Marie producers resurrected the highly successful operetta of 1924, added some new songs, framed it in magnificent scenery, let the two leads shift for themselves. Acting with considerable charm, and bursting frequently into song in the midst of Canadian wilds, Miss MacDonald and Mr. Eddy should provoke an even greater box-office triumph than by their first effort, Naughty Marietta. Marie de Flor...
...more limited qualifications. Its story of how a U. S. Federal Agent (John Boles), dispatched to investigate the doings of the vigilantes, falls in love with Rosita and eventually helps defend her family hacienda against a gang led by Charles Bickford, belongs to the sorry tradition of pre-War operetta librettos. Spirited but silly, its best moments are those in which hook-nosed Willie Howard, as a Jewish gold prospector from the Deep South, and bespectacled Herb Williams, as a rapacious insurance salesman, engage in vaudeville patter in the Golden Nugget Saloon; and those in which Miss Swarth out, with...
...started out to be a bridge engineer. The success of a composition called Soldiers of Mercy, dedicated to the Hungarian Red Cross, turned him toward music. The first tune he published in the U. S. was Some Smoke, a turkey trot, in 1913. Following year he wrote his first operetta, The Blue Paradise, and the first of his 19 Winter Garden shows. Of all the scores he has written in the past generation, he likes The Student Prince, The New Moon, Maytime and My Maryland best...