Word: vina
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Awful Truth (Columbia). Resourceful, humorous Director Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap, The Milky Way, Make Way For Tomorrow) takes a couple of derby hats, an ingratiating wire-haired fox terrier and three players without any special reputations as comedians, and spins a brightly-written Vina Delmar script into the gayest screen comedy the season has seen. In the process he establishes Irene Dunne as one of the top comediennes of current cinema, keeps Columbia's reputation for mature comedy (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Theodora Goes Wild) at its brightest. He also...
...fortune for its producers, Hollywood can be expected to exhibit amazement. No amazement is in order. Taking a subject about which everyone has speculated—the financial insecurity of old age—the picture examines the case of Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore) and his wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi). Adapted by Vina Delmar from Josephine Lawrence's novel, directed by Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap), the story is presented with rare cinematic honesty. It is acted by Victor Moore, in his first serious cinema role, and seasoned Beulah Bondi, with that effortless perfection which, because it can come only from long...
Other new singers were less impressive. Vina Bovy sang carelessly, seldom felt any obligation to act (TIME, Jan. 18). When Gertrud Ruenger, originally a contralto at the Vienna Staatsoper, took the soprano role of Brünnhilde, she sounded shrill and lifeless. John Brownlee, a young Australian baritone, made an indifferent Rigoletto. But Kerstin Thorborg raised the recruits' average with a splendid Fricka...
Much of the complaint fell upon the pretty Belgian head of Vina Bovy, the coloratura soprano who stepped into the part of Gilda in Rigoletto 24 hours before the performance when Stella Andreva caught a cold. Critics had liked her better four days earlier when she made her Metropolitan debut singing Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata. Even then they felt a little uneasy about her pitch. In Rigoletto her colorless, inexact rendition of the great Caro Nome and her literal, lifeless acting convinced few that she was the outraged, unhappy daughter of a court fool. Lawrence Tibbett...
...record was not improved by a performance of Delibes' Lakmé. New Conductor Maurice de Abravanel tortured this suave, tuneful music into Wagnerian thunder. Vina Bovy, cast as the Hindoo maid, remained Vina Bovy and gave little support to Basso Leon Rothier who made Nilakantha piteous with his fits of love and fury. Not till the middle of the week brought a competent Aïda and a warm, vivid Faust in French did critics feel confidence in Director Johnson's French & Italian wings...