Word: songfulness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...lusty, elemental drama, you'll have no kick coming. For Richard Dix, Chester Morris, and Dolores Del Rio do their respective tasks to perfection. Before the caviling mood is passed, it might be observed that in the final scene, in China, Richard and Chester's telling us in discordant song that Abdul Abulbul Ameer fought in the ranks of the Tsar, is likely to be resented by admirers of the old ballad as an unpardonable confusion...
...Harnasie are wild mountaineers in the Carpathians. Szymanowski lived with them for long periods, decided to write a ballet-pantomime full of their folk dances, a wedding, a drinking song. All these he strung together on a slender thread of plot about a mountain chief who abducts a girl. In Carnegie Hall the work was not pantomime, but the rich singing of the Art of Musical Russia chorus made it splendidly dramatic...
...leader (George Murphy) and a stage-struck heiress (Doris Nolan) who, when he makes it plain to her that she is a failure as a chorus girl, retaliates by hiring him to put on a show in her skyscraper night club. The pyramid is the irrelevantly impressive edifice of songs, dances and specialty acts supporting this picayune and wrinkled anecdote. On a broad base of music by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson, Universal's first splurge in musicomedy since its reorganization superimposes tap dancing by George Murphy, who apes Fred Astaire, and by eleven-year-old Peggy Ryan...
...dancing bananas marked Dictator Taylor's presentation last week. But there were "re-enactments" of Coronet articles on: the disappearance of the moon, in which a male quartet sang a moon-song medley with grunts substituted for the word moon; how to avoid suicide, in which simulated voices of persons about to kill themselves were broadcasted. Tonic effects included a symphony drowned out by coughers and miscued clappers; an outdoor opera eclipsed by bullfrog croakings, yowls of cats, dogs...
...Cary Grant, a wandering artist, is utterly unconvincing. Perhaps the worst scene we can recall, not only in this picture, but in all we have seen this year, is that in which Miss Moore plays fairy godmother to a particularly unpleasant crowd of yelling children by singing an inane song in her strained, professionally cheery manner. The rest of the cast, Aline MacMahon, Cary Grant, and Luis Alberni suffer from the lack of plot, and juvenile dialogue...