Word: delicatessen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Wonder Man (Goldwyn-RKO Radio) is a temperate enough description of Danny Kaye in his second full-length movie. Barring Kaye, and the pretty hoof-&-mouthing of the flea-sized, dainty screen newcomer Vera-Ellen, and some sure laughs furnished by S. Z. Sakall as a delicatessen storekeeper, the picture is about as short on drive, sparkle and resourcefulness as a Sam Goldwyn production can be. But fortunately, there is no such thing as barring Danny Kaye. He is a one-man show and, at his frequent best, a howling good...
...clothes, the public opinion polls eagerly tabulate his beliefs, his prejudices, his tastes. Few contemporary novels reflect this revolution in the status of the Average Man so sharply as Lower than Angels. Its hero is a character Sinclair Lewis might have drawn: Marvin Lang, son of a Staten Island delicatessen merchant. The story records his progress to a butcher shop, to the Army in World War I, to ownership of a prosperous market...
...Delicatessen Adventure. The other setting is the Lang delicatessen store in the village of Belle Bay on Staten Island. Bought with the $6,500 the Langs got for Grandma's house, the store was the biggest adventure of their lives. Until this point, Lower than Angels seems only another story of the decline of the lower middle class. But this store makes money. A tan, two-story-and-attic house, with its porch remodeled into a store front, it stood in a village where there were sycamore and elm trees over the streets, a Methodist Church where Marvin...
...unchanging center of his life was the delicatessen. There he retreated when his girl left him, and recovered his selfesteem. He went back to it when his wartime job in a munitions factory blew up. He rested upstairs while he recovered from the attack of "appendicitis" he caught from a girl he picked...
There are others: the rich architect (George Macready) whose wife shames him into courage; the hotel barmaid (Signe Hasso) with whom Heisler spends his last night in Germany; the old delicatessen man (Felix Bressart) who finally brings him into contact with the underground. By the time George Heisler leaves Germany he knows he has a lifelong debt to pay, not only to full-time antiFascists like himself, but also to many simple human beings, who had risked helping him out of the goodness of their hearts...