Word: version
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Broadway Melody of 1936 (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). That capacity for taking the cinema conscientiously, which has kept Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from making a really good musical revue since the original Broadway Melody (1929), is forgotten, with happy results, in the present version. The proceedings evidently must have cost a lot of money and some pains but the result is pleasant entertainment. The people who sing and dance are not film stars who have learned some routines to appear in a musical but troupers who have made themselves famed as singers and dancers...
...Dark Angel (Samuel Goldwyn) is a literate and tastefully arranged version of the celebrated sob-cinema in which Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman committed assault & battery on the emotions of the U. S. public in 1925. It is notable for the fine acting of its three attractive principals, a superior screen script and a climax which deserves a place on that roll of honor and profit which includes such classics as the life-preserver sequence in Cavalcade, the dance of the coffee rolls in The Gold Rush, the heroine's suicide in Anna Karenina...
Sirs: . . . Did Mrs. Fiske, as well as Mrs. Leslie Carter, appear in The Heart of Maryland which was the play based on the poem referred to? Mrs. Carter acted in that play during the early part of her theatrical career, and I recall seeing her in a film version. It seems extremely unlikely that both ladies should have played the same role...
Anna Karenina (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the third cinema version of Count Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece. The first was an ambitious little prodigy by Fox in 1915. The second, called Love and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927, was distinguished by an exhibit of passionate eye-rolling unmatched by anything in his later career on the part of John Gilbert. For these features, the current edition substitutes a thoroughly sane characterization of the hero by Fredric March and a decent, if not altogether unwavering, respect for the intentions of its original. The second and third versions of Anna Karenina...
...Crusades (Paramount). Cinemaddicts who have had 20 years in which to grow accustomed to the methods of Cecil Blount DeMille by now have some idea what to expect in a DeMille version of the Holy Wars. The Crusades should fulfill all expectations. As a picture it is historically worthless, didactically treacherous, artistically absurd. None of these defects impairs its entertainment value. It is a $1,000,000 sideshow which has at least three features which distinguish it from the long line of previous DeMille extravaganzas. It is the noisiest; it is the biggest; it contains no baths...