Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Diggers of 1937 (Warners) is a type of cinemusical which nobody makes so well as the Warners. It lies half way between the song-trimmed anecdotes of the Astaire cycle and the compendiums of specialty acts that are the current fashion (see p. 22). There are always plenty of plot and plenty of dancing girls with curves in the right places. There is not too much gold-digging and, above all. the established ways of creating audience sympathy for leading characters are disregarded. Heroes and heroines of the Warner cycle demand your love by being either nincompoops or rascals...
...swimming pool. Yet this scene is very funny. So are the results when the villains, now desperate, hire Genevieve (Glenda Farrell) to excite J. J.'s passion, hoping the rise in blood pressure will kill him. But Genevieve falls in love with J. J., divulges the plot and J. J., seriously ill, backs the show with Norma, still unable to sing or dance, playing the lead...
College Holiday (Paramount) is one of those enormous, uninspired amalgamations of specialty numbers which Paramount issues periodically in the hope that sheer quantity will assure every cinemaddict of finding at least one item to his special taste. Strung out along a flimsy plot-about an eccentric dowager's scheme of turning her hotel into the scene of a eugenics experiment, and the hotel manager's counterscheme of supplying, as material for the experiment, young people capable of putting on entertainments that will attract paying guests-are a series of acts which show what has become of old-fashioned...
Slalom (H. R. Sokal, Vienna) is the first full-length skiing picture with a plot to be shown in the U. S. It takes its name from the skier's term for a downhill race around obstacles. Slalom's plot runs downhill all the way, is inconsequential except as a frame for the finest skiing and skiing photography the cinema has yet displayed...
...Take It With You (by Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman; Sam H. Harris, producer) demonstrates that a pair of showmen who feel as much at home in the theatre as they do in bed can confect a magnificently funny show without bothering much about the plot. The plot of You Can't Take It With You is deliberately banal. Two young lovers are nearly parted because of their families, a dramatic situation which has not grown any younger since Pyramus & Thisbe. So theatrically threadbare is this narrative scheme that it takes an ignited dish of red fire to bring...