Word: screening
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...burdened with a superfluity of juvenile acting, in most cases under tearful circumstances. Ricardo Cortez is perfectly cast as a good friend of the night club star, but David Manners and Lyda Roberti have been deprived of bettering the show due to the short time they appear on the screen...
...gory slaughter. All the variety and all the bloodlines of the actual time and scene is presented to us; it may net be altogether authentic, but it is interesting. The only really bad parts of the picture are those involving Jackie Cooper, who should surely be removed from the screen. He is disgusting sentimental, and has not a single Varity to recommend him to any except the varies old maid...
Keeper of the Keys (adapted by Valentine Davies; Sigourney Thayer producer). This vehicle for the late Earl Derr Biggers' famed Detective Charlie Chan largely goes to prove that the wily inspector and his ponderous Chinese proverbs are better off on the screen or between book covers than on the stage. An ex-husband of a leering opera singer assembles her and three of his marital successors in his Lake Tahoe hunting lodge. Actor William Harrigan, a younger, sleeker, slightly more occidental Chan than cinema's Warner Oland, gets a head start when he is added to the party...
...harmony with a well-oiled cinematic formula, the dramatic value of this production is in inverse proportion to the fury of its advertising campaign. As the "Bureau of Missing Persons" appears on the screen, it is a harmless tale centered around the adventures of a young detective in the particular department under inspection. His inexperience is considered sufficient justification for a lengthy sermon on the value of the Bureau; his presence imparts some continuity to the series of otherwise unconnected incidents; his youth is Hollywood's reason for dragging in the love interest...
...back is, unfortunately, that which, at the same time, makes it insufferable. Mr. Ralph Morgan's mellifluous drone accompanies too, too many scenes. In the childhood shots, it is reminiscent of some unhappy travelogue; in the love sequences it garners those derisive chortles, which are the customary part of "Screen Memories;" in the rest, it flows on, and on and on, incessant, monotonous, wracking a helpless audience...