Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Samson and Delilah (Paramount) bedizens the Biblical story with all that $3,000,000 can buy: Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, 600 extras and eye-crashing Technicolor, mixed by the lavish, lily-gilding hand of Cecil B. DeMille. The result may not be quite Old Testament, but it is Bible story shrewdly blended with sex, spectacle, and the merest suggestion of social comment to keep it abreast of current Hollywood trends. It is unlikely to tarnish Producer-Director DeMille's reputation for consistently making (as well as spending) more money on pictures than anybody else...
...What is most striking in the new 'Chinese Cominform' program is that it is to be applied over a region in which the Chinese imperial monarchy formerly held a kind of paramount position, and in which large Chinese communities have been built up in modern times by emigration from China. It is also the region which, in the abortive Japanese plan for 'Greater East Asia,' was to have been . . . included, together with China, in a bloc of states under Japanese hegemony. The propaganda against 'Anglo-America' which poured forth from Tokyo only five years...
...dancing of Fred Astaire, who clicks his heels and tocs through several excellent routines. In the best of these he dances better while playing a drunk than most of the hoofers could cold sober. Throughout "Holiday Inn" Astaire plays a foil for Bing Crosby. In this film, a Paramount re-release, Crosby's voice and hairline are still intact. He sings an excellent selection of Irving Berlin tunes--"Easter Parade," "Be Careful, It's My Heart," and, of course "White Christmas." The result is like a greeting card: it has no art and no subtlety, but it's pleasant...
Chicago Deadline (Paramount) is a lagging, maudlin movie with a tricky plot that never quite gets untangled. A sentimental reporter (Alan Ladd) who finds a pretty corpse in a cheap hotel is moved to track down the people in her fat address book and find out how she came to her sordid end. After Reporter Ladd finally "winds up the case," there are at least two unexplained murders and a heroine whose life story is still pretty much of a mystery. The journalistic technique constantly threatens to make the movie a good study of sleazy big-city life...
...Blue (Paramount) is musical slapstick featuring Betty Hutton who, given a few comic situations and lively rhythms, appears to be a fissionable element exploding into energy and noise...