Word: plotting
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There are many opportunities for over-sentimentality but fortunately director Ralph Murphy has charted the course of his feamy schooner around these perils. The plot is somewhat standard: Papa Hoffman, Americanized German, whose name has for years been synonymous with the best of beer, sends his sons to France to fight the Fatherland. During their absence the Volsteadian debacle closes his lawful business and establishes the lucrative blind pig and speakeasy. Conflict between his remaining son, who now manufactures near beer, "the nearest we will ever got to beer," and Nails, his erst-while truck driver, and present racket king...
...applause which closed the initial performance of "Barberina", the first German film to be presented at Harvard. This was immediately due to technical defects in the sound reproduction, unnecessary flaws which marred a most charming cinema. Of course, the film was badly chosen; it should have had a simple plot about a man and a woman and love which came at last, after all gangsters had been removed by the heroic physical efforts of the man. When critics read a Freudian significance into the modern immediacy of "Maedchen in Uniform"--where such interpretation has about as much place...
Shakespeare wrote enthusiastically about "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England." He also wrote, as well he might, in those old days, before the flying machine and submarine...
...could add all the English mountains and hills to the landscape around Denver, and they would not be noticed. What would Shakespeare have said or written if he could have seen THIS "blessed plot," that stretches 3000 miles from one ocean to the other, including within its borders Arctic and tropical regions, its 48 States, with absolute free trade, not a custom house separating them? Arthur Brisbane in The Boston American...
...Plot is the essential weakness of the film. The acting--what there is of it--is good, though long closeups of Cadel Zeddin registering speechlessness are a bit trying. Probably three of the six reels are taken up with hand-kissing and heel-clicking. Trude ron Molo, the mother, is a good actress, but gets little opportunity to be anything more than pleasant. There is, however, an under able fascination about life in German military schools which perhaps compensates for the mediocrity of other aspects of the production...