Word: screening
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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...
Streamlined and tempered to fit the screen, Purchase has just the right amount of song & dance, patter and production to put over its good-natured kidding of Louisiana skulduggery in Kingfishy days. It also has droll, despondent, befuddled Victor Moore, not quite as broad as on Broadway but just as natural as U.S. Senator Oliver P. Loganberry, the mild-mannered but sea-green incorruptible Yankee who goes to New Orleans to investigate the odd political situation where football players share their salaries with the police...
Kathleen (Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer) brings back to the screen Shirley Temple, now almost 13, an inch and a half taller, ten pounds heavier since her retirement almost two years ago. The dimpled little actress, who has made about $2,000,000 for herself in her nine screen years, has become an appealing young lady of quiet charm and impressive assurance...
...gossip that she had served cocktails to her high-school students (TIME, July 19, 1937), her neighbors in Saugus, Mass. signed petitions; students picketed her detractors' homes. She saw her picture splashed over the nation's front pages. Columnists glorified her. Out of the notoriety came a screen test-a chance to escape the humdrum life of a schoolmarm...
That was in 1937. She flunked the screen test. A radio job in Boston petered out. She sang a few times in nightclubs. Then she was forgotten. But there was no going back to Saugus. She wound up in Manhattan, writing advertising copy for lingerie and haberdashery, living in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment, struggling to make ends meet, like thousands of other obscure working girls...