Word: tropic
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While the British Empire fights for its life, its little private dramas-often almost as stylized as British tweeds-continue. One recurrent pattern, frequently put on paper by Somerset Maugham, is that of the Britons in India or the Far East whose ultra-British correctness is suddenly upset by tropic passion. Last week in East Africa a typical Maughamesque story appeared to be coming to feverish life...
...they might all have gone down in a sea of verbiage without the mood of pursuing doom running from scene to scene. For this, the bows may well go to Cameraman Tony Gaudio, whose slanting shadows and subdued photography make the tropic atmosphere more ominous than the leer of any villain...
Actually, One Night in the Tropic?, was designed as a major film operetta. Jerome Kern, aided by Lyricists Dorothy Fields and Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote five not-so-melodious tunes for Allan Jones's piercing tenor. Short, jaunty, oldtime Musical Director A. Edward Sutherland conducted the actors through the story by the late Earl Derr Biggers. Top-flight Cinematographer Joseph Valentine ran the camera. Yet together, this combination of Hollywood's ablest backstage talent accomplished no more than a jumbled exaggeration of the Boy Meets Girl motif with scattered comic turns by Radio Zanies Abbott and Costello...
...have much news, the President said half apologetically. The sun slanted through the half-shaded windows, fell across the shoulders of his blue tropic-weight suit. It was quiet in the stifling room. What he was going to tell them about, the President continued, was the most important event in the defense of the U. S. since Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase; 'it would be announced within 22 minutes to the House of Representatives in Washington; from there it would be flashed to all their newspapers. Mr. Roosevelt grinned at his audience's chagrin-a story...
...remaining capital ship of France's Navy not already knocked out or taken over by Britain. Mightiest Frenchman of them all, the brand-new, 35,000-ton Battleship Richelieu, mounting eight 15-inch guns and a bristling mass of lesser armament, lay somewhat ahead in the tropic darkness, inside a net-boom in the harbor of Dakar. Smaller French warships lay there, too, to protect her, and all were well warned of an impending attack. For the Richelieu's commander had been signaled and had refused surrender terms similar to those offered Vice Admiral Gensoul for his squadron...