Word: showboating
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Offshore from Santa Monica and Long Beach certain long, low rods of red light glowing steadily through the Pacific nights have marked the positions of California's "floating casinos," the gambling ships Rex, Texas, Showboat and Tango. Rows of scarlet neon lights picked them out from stem to stern. Largest and swankest was the Rex, an old, British-built square-rigger, formerly the collier Kenilworth. She was demasted, equipped with a 400-foot saloon on her main deck containing roulette wheels, crap boards, tables for chemin de fer, chuck-a-luck, anything else a gambler's heart might...
...Louis Blues (Paramount) is memorable chiefly for keeping George Raft off the screen and putting Maxine Sullivan's swing rendition of Loch Lomond on it. Raft declined the leading role, that of a Mississippi showboat impresario, because he felt it did not do his talents justice. Paramount promptly suspended him from its pay roll. Miss Sullivan, 4-ft. n-in., gi-lb. Negro soprano, who in 1937 started a craze for gently swung folk tunes, made her Hollywood debut in Going Places last month. In St. Louis Blues, in addition to an excellent rendition of Loch Lomond, she touches...
Willow Joe Penny is a lanky, happy-go-lucky fellow who finds "a power of music" in everything from rubber bands to squeaking shoes, but especially in jugs. His powerful ambition is to be a showboat musician. Mrs. Penny's ambition, more powerful than Willow Joe's, is to get a home on solid ground and be respectable. So Willow Joe grits his teeth and builds cabins, which floods always wash away. But when hard times come, Mrs. Penny lets him go to work on a dilapidated showboat...
...Prohibition era, sad-eyed, quail-like Helen Morgan, with he. tousled black hair, piano-sitting technique and a voice like a pent-up sob, was the best known torch singer of them all. In the sweeping Americana of Edna Ferber's Showboat she was the modern note. Her House of Morgan was the nattiest in Manhattan's satiny nightclub belt. Last week in Philadelphia, plumper, still tousled, sad-eyed and sobby-voiced, Helen Morgan sang in three-a-day variety at cheap Fay's Theatre on Market Street. The matinee audience was unenthusiatic. "I got the bird...
...tried & true ingredients for large-scale musical melodrama, High, Wide and Handsome omits none, from folk dancing to the scene in which Sally, temporarily estranged from her husband, sings in a tent show. Produced by Arthur Hornblow in the magniloquent tradition of screen plays like Showboat and San Francisco, directed with broad strokes by Rouben Mamoulian, it is shrewd, symphonic, sentimental mass entertainment, which should satisfy most cinemaddicts, surprise almost none. Good shot: a carnival strong man tossing Red Scanlon into a creek. The Toast of New York (RKO) exhibits Edward Arnold, previously seen as Diamond Jim Brady, General John...