Word: torch
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Ruth Etting (Columbia LP). One of the alltime torch-singing queens in reissues inspired by the current film about her life, Love Me or Leave Me (TIME, June 6). Ruth Etting is past mistress of the musical affectations of the jazz age-the faint hiccup, the tear in the larynx, the lilting dash into a phrase and the heartbroken sigh as it ends. Today, some of it sounds laughable, but Songstress Etting's languorous sweetness and warmth make most of it sound just fine. Songs range from the razzmatazz rhythms of Shaking the Blues Away and At Sundown...
...baccalaureate speech at Massachusetts' Brandeis University, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt lamented the end of America's revolutionary enterprise. However, she saw a successor to carry on the torch: "I can think of only one country which today contains the spirit which founded America, and that is the state of Israel...
Love Me or Leave Me (MGM) is a Hollywood paradox: a CinemaScope musical that has the bite of authenticity. In telling the story of Ruth Etting, the famed torch singer of the '20s, the film rings true just by following the broad outline of her career as it was carried in the tabloid headlines...
...Chicago gang wars. Known familiarly as "The Gimp" because of a pronounced limp attributed to 17 shotgun slugs in his leg, Snyder soon proved his ability as a show-business Svengali. He married Ruth and managed her from dingy nightspots to nationwide popularity. But the incessant obbligato to her torch songs was Snyder's fearsome behind-the-scenes frenzies. Mostly, his uncontrolled temper was directed at Ruth's employers, and the combination of her talent and his tan trums boosted her earnings from $25 to $2,500 a week. After 17 years of his table-thumping furies, Ruth...
...dark, doom-laden Nibelungenlied. The events in it are drawn from somewhat different sources from the ones Wagner used in his familiar brooding operas. Siegfried, hero of the Rhine, jilts Brunhilde and marries a princess of Burgundy named Kriemhild. Brunhilde, a kind of earth-mother goddess, carries a torch for her lost love, but Hagen, the One-eyed, who believes the pagan gods have been flouted by this turn of affairs, pries from Kriemhild the secret of Siegfried's sole weakness. In slaying the sacred dragon of the Dwarf people, Siegfried has been drenched in the monster...