Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...research that evidently went into Desire Me pays off in some pleasant background detail about old-world religious festivals and fairs; but most of the picture smacks of the studio. There is a beautiful stone house on a beautiful stretch of shore: it looks like a fine place to live in, but the principals who live there are not plausible enough to deserve the privilege. Once in a while Greer Garson demonstrates that a good actress is jailed inside all the suffocating wax that the studio has molded around her. Newcomer Richard Hart makes a cagey, personable deceiver. Robert Mitchum...
...color, and airy pastoral scenes with pipe-playing centaurs, a goddess and dancing goats. Picasso had painted his new pictures on the scene, behind locked doors (TIME, Jan. 13). The castle's old guide, Pierre, used to tell tourists that there was "a crazy artist" in the studio, but now Pierre spends his evenings reading up on Picasso...
...strange and terrifying place. The tone of disillusion and disgust very likely comes from Bemelmans' discovery that, aside from the glittering surface, Hollywood is nothing like prewar Paris, where he delighted in being gay rather than sarcastic, and sentimental rather than cynical. We see the giant Olympia Studio, where no man is happy, and the road to success is to keep one's month tightly shut and do no work. But Bemelmans makes no judgements; instead he tells the story of the production of a ridiculous picture with grim amusement...
Here everyone is in the tentacles of Hollywood, and even the president of the studio is wretched, for his dirty old uncle bullies him and interferes with his love life. All the characters are seen as poor, pathetic creatures, and Bemelmans sets forth his point of view concisely near the end of the book: "God!... You have to be tolerant in this world, but out here you have to be especially tolerant or you choke with hate. Gee, it's easy to hate these guys, if you let yourself. They're so awful. Every one a heel, everyone a procurer...
...life. Don Gillis' new Symphony for Fun was the kind of thing the maestro could let himself go on. On the podium, he swayed, sang, all but strutted a cakewalk. Once the Toscanini temper flared up-when the xylophonist floundered over a particularly tricky passage. In the studio control room, Composer Gillis watched the struggling xylophonist, whispered to a companion: "Poor guy. Doesn't he realize that no one could possibly play that passage? Even I know that...