Word: josef
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...tone present in such Lubitsch successes as "Ninotchka." For instance, take this case: a Gestapo agent, speaking of Jack Benny's acting, says, "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." The basic plot is a natural for Benny and Miss Lombard, who are cast as Josef and Maria Tura, the leading actor and actress of Poland. He is an actor who revels in Hamlet; she is a devoted wife who enjoys an occasional flirtation. The swift destruction of Poland halts their theatre careers and they become enrolled in the underground movement. From there on the film...
Perhaps Jack Benny is no great shakes at Hamlet, but his Josef Tura is a beautiful piece of comic playing, especially when he impersonates the envoy and various Gestapo chiefs. Miss Lombard plays with consummate skill, warmth and humor. One forgets this is her last role, so compelling and captivating is her performance. The supporting cast is tops, particularly Felix Bressart, as a frustrated spear carrier, who dreams of playing Shylock; and Tom Dugan who turns in a wonderfully ludicrous impersonation of Hitler...
Shanghai Gesture is notable for its inexcusably bad acting and directing. Magniloquent Director Josef von Sternberg (once plain Joe Stern of Queens) apparently spent a million or so dollars trying to repeat his former success in turning Marlene Dietrich into the screen's No. 1 siren (Blue Angel, Morocco, etc.). He succeeds merely in making Gesture an unexciting series of close-ups of Miss Tierney, a nice, pretty, corn-fed American girl of 21, who is too young and inexperienced for her part...
Such, or thereabouts, is Artur Rubinstein, Polish prodigy who has been a professional pianist for 42 of his 53 years. He is now on a 25-week tour. For pianistic form and box-office appeal, Rubinstein rates with the best of them-polished Josef Hofmann (56 years at the keyboard); titanic Sergei Rachmaninoff; glittering Vladimir Horowitz; sober Artur Schnabel; suave Walter Gieseking (now in Switzerland); rippling-fingered Moriz Rosenthal, 79-year-old pupil of Liszt...
Musicianly Josef Marais controls the timing and tone of his broadcast with the grace of a ballet master. A pleasant script takes him, two boon companions and a Hottentot boy on various African adventures that provide easy openings for such love songs as Here Am I, unique in its treatment of the adamantine mother theme, or such tender Boer campfire songs as Brandy, Leave Me Alone...