Word: riffraff
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...Riffraff (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is what Hollywood calls a box-office picture, meaning one whose merits, if any, will be revealed at the ticket slot rather than in the comments it will occasion. What will make it box-office is that it evokes, out of the half-forgotten time when pictures could be naughty, the original Jean Harlow...
Maudlinity is the keynote of Riffraff. Its situations come out of a can that was stale long before the first tuna was tinned. And it makes no effort to turn to account the genuine picturesqueness of the San Pedro, Calif, docks, where most of Riffraff was shot. Best scene: the finance company reclaiming the allurements of the Tracy-Harlow home...
...place for Californians to get roaring drunk during most of Prohibition. Seven years ago a syndicate of U. S. hotelmen went two miles deeper into Mexico, to a hot springs oasis and there built a complete, lavish money-spending plant, charged high prices, black-listed the Tijuana riffraff and called their settlement Agua Caliente ("Hot Water"). Repeal killed drab Tijuana, merely boomed the horse & dog racing, the Casino gambling, swimming, drinking at Hot Water. Natives of Hollywood, only an hour and a half away by plane, got in the habit of weekending there. Cineman Joseph Schenck bought into the Hotel...
...five days and five nights last week the 250,000 citizens of loud, lusty Memphis, Tenn. knocked off all work, played host to the bankers and businessmen, the planters and politicians, the farmers and their field hands. Negroes, white trash and riffraff of the entire mid-Mississippi Valley in one grand, rip-snorting jubilee-the fourth annual Cotton Carnival.* Richmond, Atlanta and New Orleans had had their days, would have them again. But last week was Memphis's and on her was every eye in Dixie. Memphis, where De Soto built his river barges 79 years before anybody heard...
Sierra; Arthur J. Beckhard, producer). A volcanic opera diva returns to Andalusia from Madrid at the request of her abandoned husband, who wants to tone up their daughter's wedding by the appearance of both the bride's parents. The diva arrives with a lot of theatrical riffraff, the daughter cools to her fiance, but the parents are happily reunited as the curtain falls. The diva is impersonated by Blanche Yurka, a seasoned actress who has of late years specialized in Ibsen. Greek tragedy and was one of the Narrators in Lucrece. The playwright is the author...