Judge — February 1934 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Judge THE HE chorus girl has out-lived r time and her usefulness nd most of the younger musi showmen know it. When the t people considered the stage a part of the underworld, the young m ud their papas who sat in the front w got a genuine $5.50 kick from the chorus lift its dresses and do a time step. And even in the first Earl Carroll ex- anzas, when a sneeze from the front row was enough completely undrape fifty beauties, including those hanging rom the chandeliers, the chorus girl was considered by the boys a naught But in our time the st ely dis- rtly because the theatre became cluttered with vest By PARE ng therefore exciting part of the show age door Johnny has almost comple! peared: Best People; partly because the yc the Best People used words and ideas tion which no chorus girl consid . but largely be. cause even in Des Moines and Ypsilanti, illicit and every other kind of love is freely admitted and discussed. As a consequence, the chorus g rt of the musical show, unless, of course, she is made to dance, sing, and act as well as most of the principals. The Broadway choruses presented in recent years by the Messrs orge Kaufman, Howard Dietz, Jerome Kern, Moss Hart and Dwight Wiman have been able to do a great deal more than look attractive in the raw; and the show gir has almost been eliminated by these advanced entrepreneurs OVIE producers, on the other / N ry rather than ob- servation for their theat rical ideas, and we have scene a in movie musicals in which two dozen blondes lift forty-eight legs in front of the came the inger members of in parlor conversa- ered de 1 has become a monoton- hand, draw upon mem- sa result ter scene a; wheel, return in ermine wraps and squat on a black marble floor; kick again; wheel, return with black tights, fall gracefully to a white mar- ble floor and kick again As a finale they stand in line, go into a half split, 1 the cam is trundled in and out of the forty- eight calves. Such goings- have been abandoned ¢ Broadway—even by the Shuberts—for several years. And when you con- sider that the movie cho- ruses aren’t even shown in the flesh, that they are three thousand miles away from the audience, one wonders in vain why every movie producer goes to such pains to include cho- rus routines in musical an alor she am Goldwyn MOVIES “Omigosh—this is the same guy we kidnapped last week! 14 has come closest to warming cellu- loid with a girl routine. In “Roman Scandals” he held down his chorus to an attractive nude sequence; he had no regular dance routine; he put his girls in white wigs and set them off with a mulatto chorus, and he concentrated on their general anatomy instead of their legs He weeded some attractive figures from the several hun- dred tons of bodies shipped annually to the coast, and his scenes were effective and ingenuous. Almost everything, in fact, usually botched in movie mu- icals was done well enough in this picture to make it enter- ng. Eddie Cantor is not a comedian; not, that is, in that W. C. Fields or Jimmy Savo are natural comedians, but he is shrewd, and he worked with his di- or, Frank Tuttle, well enough to get some goc from old and well-tried comic situations; situations, such as he laughing gas sequence, and the crap-shooting scene, | would have sworn to you, couldn't make me crack a smile again, LORENTZ Ai the sense ree laughs Perhaps nt e brief contact Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Kauf- id With the manuscript, or the proximity of Mr. Op- heimer, gave an extra polish to “Roman Scandals.” Per- aps it was the very funny phrase of music Al Newman reiterated during the picture. Perhaps it was director Tuttle MIL I know is that [ don’t think Eddie Cantor don't like musical shows; I'd bh Roman Le w per h * w is funny rd or seen every gag in Scandals.” yet T thought it was pretty funny and ‘C oyed it very much ONVENTION City” has th ion, I believe, of being e first movie to satirize he sales convention, As a barbarous, American phe- nomena, a constantly re- curring saturnalia of proper Methodists, the sales convention is worth epic Warners missed an opportunity to furnish future soc with a fine monograph on our business ne attention, gists civilization; but then, I suppose, no fu ture scientist understood made a_ str. ; and, I'm quite sure, the Warner Brothers wouldn't have either. What they did do w mislay the original theme and insert the plot of “Gold Digger which they have re-made in “Havana Widows,” and in at least three other recent farces, using their comedy repertory team of Guy Kibbee, Joan Blondell, (Page 23, please) have they satire; would had it comicbooks.com