Word: technicolorful
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...least of the picture's merits is its innovation of alternating technicolor and monochrome to depict earth and heaven. The latter is a highly fanciful creation, and the Hollywood-Bowlish representation of the High Court of Judgment stretches the imagination almost beyond the bounds of good taste. But no one, whether atheist or fatalist, can fail to enjoy the high humor of the heavenly consternation when a "clerical error" results in the unscheduled prolongment of the doomed flier's life-on-earth...
Slnbad the Sailor (RKO Radio) is an old-fashioned Arabian Nights charade. It has pretty Technicolor, fancy dress and a busy, fairly stilted plot that chases itself with too little humor through pirate ships and sultans' palaces. Very young moviegoers will doubtless eat it up. Oldsters who have already taken this romantically oriental tour time & again will not be surprised when the hero (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), with a perfectly straight face, addresses the heroine (Maureen O'Hara) as "Ah, Burning Bright. . . O Woman of the Roses...
Anthony Quinn and Walter Slezak are suitably hateful as menaces, and Miss O'Hara is gorgeous in Technicolor. Fairbanks is energetic, but seems aware of the dangers of trying to imitate his late father. The elder Fairbanks would not only have given Sinbad more athletic bounce; while he was about it, he would also have slyly kidded the stuffing out of the plot's cloth-of-gold shirt...
Selznick was first "surprised," then "upset" at the complaints. He had Johnston office approval before releasing the picture, had not shown it to the Legion of Decency only because a Technicolor strike had delayed prints of it until too late. Moreover, the film had not yet been distributed nationally. Selznick murmured that there might be some revisions. But an extended ban by the Catholic Church would mean plenty of trouble. Duel, already expensively delayed, could not be held up and revised if it was to gross the $20,000,000 that Selznick expected...
When Twentieth Century Fox decided to put out a technicolor period piece about the trials of a working girl in Boston in the Seventies, they apparently thumbed through the Joe Miller index and looked up all the standard japes about the Hub city. Into this essentially fine musical comedy idea they threw Betty Grable and Dick Haymes and proceeded to develop that peculiar mixture of maudlin sentiment and half-hearted satire that passes for musical comedy on the screen. The result, which was supposed to send Bostonians hustling to their desks to write indignant letters to the local papers...