Word: tonk
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...Ghost Goes West, a satiric fantasy about an amorous Scottish shade, and it was a ten-strike (TIME, Jan. 20, 1936). But The Flame of New Orleans, scripted by Norman Krasna (Bachelor Mother), is no equal of The Ghost. Occasional touches-word of La Dietrich's honky-tonk past conveyed from ear to ear at her introduction to New Orleans' society, a wedding gown floating mysteriously down the Mississippi, shutters opening drowsily on the quay at dawn-give proof that Clair is still there. But the rest is without much imagination or invention...
...Sheridans may come and go, but Dietrich will star forever. Her latest, "The Seven Sinners," is a cinema "Panama Hattie" with a Malayan locale, minus the fifth column and Ethel Merman and plus a liberal sprinkling of the Navy. Marlene, just as alluring in the part of a honky-tonk songstress as ever she could have been in her pre-Hitler Berlin musical comedy days, makes up for the loss of Ethel...
...Over Broadway, another of his preoccupations with the regeneration of moral strays who have felt the cooling shadow of death. The three strays are a tippling, has-been playwright (Thomas Mitchell), a dapper drugstore cowboy (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), a lady of the evening (Rita Hayworth). In a Broadway honky-tonk they tie up with a small-time larcenist (John Qualen) about to commit suicide rather than face punishment for filching $3,000 to pamper his faithless wife. Before the evening is over they unite to win Qualen another $3,000, get themselves into some tense brushes with gamblers...
Chief looseners are a trio of sailors impersonated by Rags Ragland, Pat Harrington & Frankie Hyers-the last two on leave from Manhattan's locally famed "18 Club," where for some years they have assisted Comedian Jack White in making that institution a sort of petit palais of honky-tonk humor and personal insult. Mr. Porter has worked with funny men before (Victor Moore, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr). But never with any so fundamentally low-down funny as these. In Panama Hattie one of them observes to his pal Ragland: "You make more cheap dolls than they do in Japan...
...Honky Tonk Train Blues" by Milt Herth is the first record I have ever hard by this Hammond organist that had some good ideas, well executed. "Slow Freight" is back in the same old disappointing style, however... Les Brown, back on the label he started out to record for (Decca), finally has a band that is mature enough to attempt things beyond seeing how many high Cs the brass section can play. "Comanche War Dance" is a very creditable version of the Ray Noble tune, and "Walkin' and Swingin'" is an excellent job on the Mary Lou Williams original. Plano...