Word: screens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most in evidence and least in the way is Comic Milton Berle (Earl Carroll's Vanities, See My Lawyer), whose patter is sometimes funny, though his aversion to new jokes is hardly an asset. The screen's best deadpan butler, Arthur Treacher, buttles his way through a succession of poor skits. With finely formed, Hungarian-born Ilona Massey, the Follies does a little girl-glorifying, but in general the show lacks oomph as well...
...story takes Little Joe Jackson ("Rochester") and his wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) through Joe's moral predicaments, including a nightclub scorcher named Georgia Brown (Lena Horne), on his way to a needle's-eye squeeze into heaven. M.G.M. adds insult to insensitivity by issuing a pretentious screen-print foreword of legend sources and race dreams: "The folklore of America has origins in ... all races, all colors. This story . . . seeks to capture those values...
...many thousand Melvyn Douglas-Norma Shearer-Joan Crawford-Robert Taylor et al gay sophisticated comedies that Hollywood has created under the categorical title of Ars Gratia Artis, "The Crystal Ball," with the Paulette Goddard-Ray Milland combo, makes a more distinctive showing at the box office than on the screen. Definitely an argument for the $25,000 a year income ceiling...
...Pilots and gunners were severely sunburned in early plastic airplane enclosures; new plastics screen out the ultraviolet rays intense at high, clear altitudes...
...mother; Ulysses' & friends' raid on a forbidden apricot tree; the pursuit of Tom Spangler by a rich young pretty (Marsha Hunt); Bess and her girl friend picking up three lonely soldiers; Marcus playing hymns on his concertina in a troop train. The sum total of these screen adventures never quite attains the soaring enthusiasm of Saroyan's novel, and some of the preaching is hard to take. Yet at its best The Human Comedy is immensely moving. Even its preaching sometimes achieves an eloquence that gives the picture a psychological fifth dimension...