Word: kidded
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Forty Little Mothers, the Cantor offering, was once Le Mioche (The Kid), a charming French film comedy, though the producers of Le Mioche might not recognize their baby. For once Comedian Cantor is unusually restrained. As a worried bachelor professor who furtively fathers an abandoned boy baby in a girls' seminary, Cantor limits his histrionics to planting wet smacks on the patient infant, singing one lachrymose ditty, Little Curly Hair. Once tears trickle down his nose. But smart Showman Cantor lets cute Baby Quintanilla, and scads of leggy little schoolgirls, among whom are Bonita Granville and Diane Lewis...
...Overland Kid, a stiff who was killed falling off a fast freight, returns to earth as Advance Ticket Taker for the Heavenly Express, a ghost train. Since the Heavenly Express elects to use the tracks of the Santa Fe, it causes quite a commotion in roundhouse circles...
Part of an old hobo legend, the Heavenly Express makes a pleasant theatre fantasy, but Playwright Bein leans on it too heavily as a plot device. He has also treated his fantasy far too coyly. The Overland Kid (John Garfield) dances all over the stage, cavorts on chairs and tables, makes pixie faces and Puckish gestures, behaves like someone who is more at home on a tricycle than in freight cars...
...play comes most alive when it forgets its plot and lets The Overland Kid sing the songs of the road, including such a glimpse of Hobo Heaven as the oldtime hobo song...
...American resentment against the Shylock of the North. Extremists in the South are hardboiled governments (Mexico's, Bolivia's) which assume that the U. S. has the jitters. Eager to capitalize on Washington's fear that the Fascist axis will undermine the Monroe Doctrine, they would kid the U. S. into canceling the bonds, highjack new credits in the name of hemisphere security...