Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Felicia Metcalfe, produced by Elizabeth Miele). The carefree spontaneity of this home-folks comedy, pat for stock company production, had to overcome Manhattan audiences' familiarity with too many identical predecessors. Situation: a slovenly Baltimore family with one respectable relative are happily starving and avoiding the eye of Work. Plot: a daughter gets an Italian count and the uncle gets $25,000 in the stockmarket. Then they lose the $25,000 in the stockmarket and the count is suspected of being a fake, writing a bad check, stealing the engagement pin he has given his fiancée and running...
...Waters, produced by Lee and J. J. Shubert) is a repetitive comedy about a strumpet who can narrow and widen her eyes. Situation: into a country-houseful of friendly weekenders is insinuated a deceased playwright's baby-faced mistress, representing herself as a grief-shattered widow (Queenie Smith). Plot: she drills unremittingly into the head of every man visible that he is a big strong man, she a little weak woman. Thus she gets proposals of various kinds from a bachelor, a married man too much in love with his busy literary wife, and a theatrical producer...
Love and Babies (by Herbert P. Mc-Cormack, produced by Morris Green and Frank McCoy) is a domestically salacious trifle purporting to show how husbands and wives talk about procreation. Plot: a wife wants a baby, her husband does not. To soften him the wife invites as guests a couple who have a baby. The childless husband takes an interest but keeps his attitude. Meanwhile the father-husband fears his child has stolen his wife's love, receives an invitation from the childless wife to father her baby. He agrees, then reneges because he wants the other husband...
...Ivor Novello, produced by William A. Brady and Samuel F. E. Nirdlinger) is a slice of pure snob entertainment off the heel of the loaf. It projects a party given for a famed young London actress after her opening night: Lora Baxter in distant simulacrum of Tallulah Bankhead. Plot: Miss Baxter inveigles her old lover, now married, into kissing her. His little wife sees the kiss and tries to die by gulping all of what she thinks is Miss Baxter's cocaine. But it is only powdered sugar and her swoon is a symptom only of autosuggestion. Subplot...
Moonlight and Pretzels (Universal). The extraordinary thing about this musi-comedy is not that it resembles Forty-Second Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 in plot, pattern and environment; that it has the same type of dances, staged by Bobby Connolly, and the same type of songs ("Dusty Shoes'" for a finale instead of ''Forgotten Men"); or that its ingenue, Mary Brian, not only looks like Ruby Keeler but has obviously been coached to. speak in the same soft monotone. The surprising aspect of Moonlight and Pretzels is that it makes plausible Hollywood's profound conviction...