Word: background
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...script is rather incpt patchwork, composed of three O'Ncill plays and a war background to fill the gaps. The action takes place aboard a British tramp steamer and in wet harbor streets infested with demi-monde and cops. All kinds of human fates are thrown together on the S.S. Glencairn, drifting about helplessly on the long voyage that seldom ends at home. John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, and Ian Hunter are three of the ragged, whisky-minded seafarers whose whole characters are unfolded step by step. There is frustration in all of them, the frustration that drove them...
Nobody "bogs down" in New Mexico. Despite its background of 400 years of history since the first explorations by white men, New Mexico is young and vigorous. By 1950 it will move into first place in rate of population growth...
...little "Butch" LaGuardia, who hooked a fast right to a Detroit heckler's nose this week, stumped mightily for the President: "If Wendell Willkie is a businessman, I am Mercury. . . . [Willkie is] a promoter par excellence, a ballyhoo artist . . . but unreliable and uninformed and with absolutely no business background. . . . While Wendell Willkie was plugging Commonwealth & Southern, President Roosevelt was building the soundest defense for this country...
Arise, My Love (Paramount) turns the neat trick of setting a comedy against the background of current events in Europe. Its principal device is to hustle a carefree American aviator (Irish-born Ray Milland) and a beauteous American reporter (French-born Claudette Colbert) through a series of romantic interludes spiced with lines whose moral and political implications would have made the Hays office of a year ago writhe in righteous indignation. While Milland is escaping from a Spanish prison camp, drinking with Miss Colbert in Paris just prior to the outbreak of war, and making love in the forest...
...director, Sturges converted this unpretentious plot into a happy, slightly noisy comedy with a Chaplinesque background of pathos. He ably remodeled Powell from the vacuous crooner of Warner Brothers musicals into a convincing prototype of a drudge with a dream of sudden wealth with which he can buy his mother a convertible settee and his girl a fancy wedding. Pale-faced, canyon-mouthed Ellen Drew, a onetime Hollywood soda clerk, was coached into a realistic likeness of a sugary, $18-a-week stenographer. A good dramatist, Sturges kept his characters credible by the simple but neglected technique of letting them...