Word: screenings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Town (Columbia). Columbia's star team of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra are co-masters of a unique kind of U. S. comedy, part farce, part fantasy and part pure hokum, which has been often imitated but never successfully copied since they brought it to the screen in It Happened One Night. This time, in Clarence Budington Kelland's ingenious story about the misfortunes of a humble young man who inherits $20,000,000, they have a perfect show case for their specialty...
...essence of Riskin-Capra magic to defy analysis on paper because it fits so perfectly its proper medium, the screen. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town it is applied most spectacularly to a courtroom scene in which Longfellow simultaneously proves his sanity and regains the faith in the girl he loves (Jean Arthur) which he had lost on learning that she was the reporter who made him the city's laughing stock. The scene is consequently the funniest as well as one of the most spiritually nourishing cinema climaxes of the current season...
...screen drama "Ecstasy" suffers in American eyes from a slowness of pace and a naivete which make it heavy at times. It has considerable photographic beauty and a very satisfying musical score. The chief merit of the picture, however, must be attributed to the compellingly intense performance of Hedy Kiesler in the central role of the young girl. There is a roughness and occasional incoherency which are probably the result of virtuous scissors...
...this reviewer, the bowdlerizing of the script seemed no great loss, except that it brought the exceeding weakness of the dramatic construction out from behind the screen of "life in the raw" or whatever it was that the censor didn't like. For in this case the play certainly is not the thing. Two acts of half-baked comedy are capped by one of equally misshapen tragedy, with the whole thing ineffectually sprinkled over by the note of abject poverty and misery...
...real life, Lieutenant Rowan is now a 79-year-old retired colonel who lives quietly in California with nothing much more than a medal he received in 1922 to remind him of his feat. He may be surprised, in this screen play by Gene Fowler and W. P. Lipscomb, to learn his mission was to deliver a mysterious sealed letter; that he was aided by a swashbuckling ex-sergeant of Marines (Wallace Beery) and the lovely daughter (Barbara Stanwyck) of a Cuban patriot; that his principal antagonist was an international spy of in determinate nationality (Alan Hale); and that...