Word: stardom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...longtime master of old-school (non-acrobatic) tap dancers; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan. Grandson of a slave, Robinson ran away from his home-town Richmond at eight, shined shoes, worked as stableboy and waiter, danced for nickels & dimes in beer joints before he rose to millionaire stardom (as high as $8,000 a week) in vaudeville, movies (The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel with Moppet Shirley Temple) and musicomedies (The Hot Mikado). A natural dancer who never took a lesson, he gave lessons to Eleanor Powell and Ruby Keeler, originated the widely imitated stair dance, danced down Broadway...
...dizzy foolishness of this sodapop operetta is made more foolish by its opulence. Every good thing about it is lavishly doubled or tripled. There are two prodigies and two frustrated opera-singer parents kicking them up to stardom, two comics (Jules Munshin and Keenan Wynn) and two imperturbable renegades from the fine arts (Ethel Barrymore and Jose Iturbi). Among the players, only Thomas Gomez (whose portrait of a tenor warming up his tonsils spoofs both tenor and script) seems to be having any fun in the machine comedy...
...sort of role that Rudolph Valentino, the greatest movie lover of them all, would have enjoyed. The role: an immigrant Italian tango-dancer rises from a gardener's job in Manhattan's Central Park to the giddiest heights of Hollywood stardom, and then dies at the age of 31. But independent Producer Edward (The Count of Monte Cristo) Small sees the story as a box-office natural. For eleven years Small has been getting his name in the papers year in & year out by promising to film Valentino's life...
...Champion, the movie based on Ring Lardner's story of a middleweight heel, brought sudden stardom to Actor...
Sorrowful Jones (Paramount), a remake of Damon Runyon's Little Miss Marker, turns out to be a major salvage operation. The original 1934 Hollywood version lifted Shirley Temple to stardom. The current version, though it has very little to do with Runyon, lifts Comedian Bob Hope out of an accumulated litter of silly scripts, props and costumes, and gives him a new grip on the U.S. public's funny bone...