Word: westley
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Marshall from the dignity of his Paris apartment to the wild charms of music-hall life; also sad is the change forced on Bert Lahr, who has been transported from his usual garden of foolery to the role of Zaza's faithful partner. Even the erratic foibles of Helen Westley fail to inject a real sparkle into the picture. With a more personable male lead, and a plot just a bit more complicated than its two-sided triangle, "Zaza" might have provided real film relish...
...Baroness and the Butler" should have been even better, for the cast--Annabella, William Powell, Helen Westley, Henry Stephenson--and sets are considerably better. But banal treatment, poor direction, and a too melodramatic climax, rob the picture of much of its appeal. Shown together, however, the two films make a good double bill, being less similar and probably more entertaining, than this review would indicate...
...question is how to get Prima Donna Elsa Terry (Grace Moore) from Manhattan to the Argentine, to fulfill an engagement in Buenos Aires. Her faded diva aunt (Helen Westley) insists that she go to Paris instead. Up from the pampas come Emissary James Guthrie (Melvyn Douglas) and his stooge, "Pancho" Brown (Stuart Erwin), who lay siege to Elsa with flowers, gifts, attentions. When Elsa discovers what seems to be a ring of cold business in Guthrie's honeydew phrases. the plot bears to the left, but the clairvoyant audience knows it will come right again...
...though this were serious drama instead of a light cinema with warmish music. What is most original about Banjo On My Knee is that the tunes never separate the story from its pattern but are cued in so as to help the feeling. It also permits able Helen Westley who, as a stand-by of the New York Theatre Guild, was noted for her interpretation of squalid roles, to reach a new low in this respect. A shabby pioneer in Green Grow the Lilacs, a harlot's mother in They Shall Not Die, she appears in Banjo...
Dimples (Twentieth Century-Fox). Dimples Appleby (Shirley Temple) lives with her grandfather (Frank Morgan), a lovable, broken-down actor. A rich old lady (Helen Westley) wants to provide Dimples with what that little girl calls a better "envinament." The struggle implicit in this situation is amicably adjusted when Dimples wins acclaim as Little Eva in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which her grandfather, under cork, disguises himself...