Word: unreality
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When Emily's father died, she had grown into the habit of being a recluse. Hypersensitive about venturing into the unreal daily world, she finally would not address her many letters, had her sister do it for her, or else pasted printed addresses on the envelopes. Though she seemed to live in a vacuum, says Biographer Taggard: "We think it now the busiest spot in the 19th Century...
...Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrova is a sombre melodrama about a young woman who leaves a Russian general to become the mistress of a lieutenant and who goes back to the general again to save her lover, a cheat at cards, from public disgrace. It is familiar material, unreal and overacted, but stamped with the European cachet of original direction and distinguished by the blonde beauty of Brigitte Helm. Best shot: the introductory sequence, repeated again at the end, in which the spectator follows the camera's eye through a villa apparently empty, through a room and a hallway...
...staging, good Gershwin tunes and 5,000 voices have been assembled in this reproduction of a Broadway operetta. Bernice Claire is supposed to be a sort of Russian Joan of Arc; you are led to believe that the theme song she sings brings about the Revolution. It is extravagantly unreal, entirely out of the tradition of naturalistic cinema. Audiences who like operetta and audiences in the country who have never had much chance to decide whether they like it or not may find Song of the Flame to their taste. Others may prefer to wait until the songs...
Double Crossroads (Universal). That it is plotty and thoroughly unreal does not keep this little crook-story from being a fair program picture. It tells how a racketeer, just out of prison, decides to go straight on falling in love with a country girl and changes his mind when he finds out she is crooked too. The complications, which reach their climax in a party given at the house of the rich woman whom the gang is out to rob, are made tolerable by their occasional humor and the acting of able bit-characters. Best shot: a sweet old lady...
...this is a play which might better have been deliberately and devilishly unreal. The case of Madeleine Smith, if it could be faithfully transferred to the stage, might provide an exciting study in various violent phases of psychology. But it suggests to the imagination a stained and elegant fiction about a creature of the shade, sinuous and fascinating. Katharine Cornell conveys enough of this quality to indicate what might have been possible. Her high cheek bones are blanched, yellowish, sickly, as she reminds her boyish suitor that she lay with the dancer before killing him. When she tears the telephone...