Word: ratoff
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Gateway (Twentieth Century-Fox). Grand Hotel melodrama against an Ellis Island background, with Don Ameche, Arleen Whelan, Gregory Ratoff, Binnie Barnes and Gilbert Roland...
...story, credited to Comedian Gregory Ratoff, concerns the ambition of fluffy Judith Poe Wells (Alice Faye) to write a searching play, one thing never achieved by her illustrious great grandfather Edgar Allan Poe.* When penniless Miss Wells consumes three orders of spaghetti in a Broadway restaurant, the proprietor and his violinist (Rubinoff) let her sing for her supper. That is enough to convince Diner George Macrae (Don Ameche), a successful musical comedy librettist, that Judith is wasting her time as a playwright. Although this impression is confirmed when Macrae and Producer Sam Gordon (Charles Winninger) read her dismal drama, North...
...know is that marrying her is Prince Alexis' job, assigned to him by the rascally proprietor to whom he has given an elastic check; and that he finds the job distasteful because, being in love with her, he dislikes . the role of fortune hunter. When Paul (Gregory Ratoff), a waiter at the Cafe Metropole, turns out to be a genuine Prince Panaieff, the situation becomes so involved that even Proprietor Victor has an anxious moment or two before the denouement in which Victor gets the money he needs to save his cafe, Laura Ridgeway gets her impostor...
...fragile anecdote, Cafe Metropole turns out to be thoroughly entertaining. Russian Actor Ratoff, who wrote the story from which Author Jacques Deval (Tovarich) adapted the screen play, acts his fat part with the enthusiasm it deserves, sets the pace for the rest of a cast of which each member is performing a specialty in which he is tops. Good shot: Adolphe Menjou, Hollywood's ablest exponent of the art of playing maitre d' hotel since The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (1926), introducing a dish of wild strawberries, brought from Algeria by special plane...
...apes Fred Astaire, and by eleven-year-old Peggy Ryan, who apes Eleanor Powell; singing by Gertrude Niesen, imported from radio; clowning by The Three Sailors, imported from vaudeville; Scotch dialect by Ella Logan, who also sings, dances and makes faces; and specialty bits by Mischa Auer, Gregory Ratoff, Hugh Herbert, Henry Armetta. The climax occurs in the night club when patrons and performers mingle in a musical mob scene which for pure size is the most ambitious of the season. Best song: Top of the Town...