Word: wanger
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sophisticated Producer Walter Wanger has used Technicolor to create a fabulous spectacle, but he does not take his work too seriously. The tale pokes fun at itself and slyly cuckolds the Hays office. In Nights there is a tubby old boy who claims to have been "the Bag of Bagdad." There is an Aladdin (John Qualen) whose companions jeer: "You've told that lamp story so often you believe it yourself." There is a Sinbad (Shemp Howard) whose refrain is: "This calls to mind an experience I once had as a sailor." And there is a harem which does...
Apparently unable to decide whether his picture should be straight documentary or straight Hollywood, Producer Walter Wanger made it both. Somehow he manages to give a fairly coherent idea of what it is like to be an R.A.F. pursuit pilot, though hampered by a ragged plot and the fact that, whenever a convenient shell crater or ditch appears, someone is sure to pop into it for a long, dull, heart-to-heart talk...
...Sundown (Wanger; United Artists). In East Africa, sundown is the best time of the day. It is quiet then; night is near; and there is nothing to do. There, in a lonely desert outpost, Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Reginald Gardiner and other British colonials thwart a Nazi scheme to arm and rouse the natives, in ten reels of old-fashioned romanticadventure melodrama...
Producer Walter Wanger, holding tight to the theme of Author Barre Lyndon's original novel, worked overtime to plant his elaborate desert with oases of significance. He made the border skirmish part of Adolf Hitler's so-called plan of navy-less world domination (by conquering the European-Asiatic land mass, thus becoming independent of his enemies' sea power). He also furnished a flag-waving ending. Both devices are more embarrassing than exciting...
These are two records of personal suffering written by two anti-Nazi-intellectuals caught in France by the war. Feucht-wanger-author of Power, The Ugly Duchess and other notable novels-was a peace-loving, contemplative Jew of 57. Except for the stench of Naziism in his nostrils, he had no interest in politics, little sense of events to come...