Word: screening
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There is much fine Technicolor and court pouf-pouf. But pretty Lucille Ball needs a voice; Cabaret Comedian Zero Mostel in his screen debut seems to need an intimate audience; Tommy Dorsey's band needs fewer powdered wigs and more good tunes to play. A characteristic flight of wit is a non-Porter song which runs: "No matter how you slice it, it's still Salome...
...practice of Fascism. The picture works under several handicaps: 1) the broad contents of its story are wearily familiar to many; 2) the territory which must be covered is vast and intricate; 3) the teaching method-that of the illustrated lecture-means that the enormous power possible in screen images is dominated and reduced by words. But against these obstacles, Prelude to War does nearly always a better-than-average job, occasionally a brilliant...
Presenting Lily Mars (M.G.M.) is a conventional screen version of 73-year-old Booth Tarkington's tale of a stagestruck small-town girl. This juvenile darling (Judy Garland) gets to Broadway before you can say Jake Shubert, marries a great producer (Van Heflin), and is soon seen swaying in black tulle in a super-sumptuous musical show staged by the lucky fellow...
...political implications of these moves are painfully obvious. Reticent about meeting Roosevelt in a fourth campaign, the G.O.P. is deliberately laying a smoke screen to prevent the country from choosing the most able leadership by such clear cut issues as past performance and future promise. Still applicable in the strain of war are Washington's words of 1788 that "I can see no propriety in precluding ourselves from the services of any man, who on some great emergency shall be deemed universally capable of serving the public...
...translate, Saroyon's message of man's basic goodness to a medium such as the screen requires a delicate hand, because the idea is very apt to be overdone. Clarence Brown, producer director, and Howard Estabrook, who wrote the screen play, try very hard but they sometimes outdo the shaggy-haired eccentric in being sloppily sentimental. "The Human Comedy" is the story of a typically Saroyan family in the typically Saroyan town of Ithaca, California. There is Homer MacCauley, who pedals a bicycle for Postal Telegraph and learns about life (Saroyan life, that is) from veteran telegrapher Frank Morgan...