The Guardsman

Lunt and Fontanne deliver the goods in Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen at the Burg Theater in Vienna, but then, they are actors...

From such an eminence, Lubitsch in To Be or Not to Be could not fail to... shock and disgust Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.

The most elegant of all dramatis personæ.

The Actor.

The Actress.

The Critic.

Liesl.

“Mama”.

A Creditor.

The screenplay is Vajda on Molnar. The Chopin is so delightfully played, so witty...

This happened to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Barkleys of Broadway (dir. Charles Walters), and of course this is the basis of the anecdote in Pinter’s play, The Lover.

The clock advances half an hour, on cue...

“We meet in costume,” Gielgud tells the interviewer. “We meet as other people,” Richardson adds.

“I can’t help it, I’ve shed so many real tears in the theater, I can’t always keep them back at home.”

The Actor, a man of genius, undertakes to cuckold himself as the title character, the reason is sheer apprehensiveness, the Actress preens herself in a hand mirror like a cat.

Don Giovanni at the Opera.

“No, no, please be reasonable.”

No actor is a guardsman to a wife or a creditor.

A critic such as Mordaunt Hall (New York Times) would have more, “for then this medium of entertainment would be on a far higher plane.”

“Filmed for the sake of its stars” (Halliwell’s Film Guide, citing Variety on business prospects any number of minutes from Broadway).

The Barretts of Wimpole Street

Moulton-Barrett’s officious grace over dinner in the opening scene is briefly attended by Flush, Elizabeth’s dog, who immediately turns aside to climb the stairs where Heaven is, knowing “seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

March’s Browning is particularly good. That opening scene lays out the entire predicament and is entirely worthy of the poets.

Andre Sennwald (New York Times) praised the picture to the best of his abilities and noted the performance given by the dog as well. Variety was initially at a loss, “as a film it’s slow. Very.” Time Out Film Guide stopped there, “slow, deliberate, dull.”

Halliwell talks a lot of nonsense but gives more Variety, “truly an actor’s picture, with long speeches and verbose philosophical observations.”

Newmeyer & Taylor’s Doctor Jack with Harold Lloyd has much the same idea.

The Dark Angel

The anecdote is told at great length in order to accommodate certain details, these are the fruits of cultivation that produce the vintage, a terrible malentendu that disappears as if it had never been.

No remedy for the wedding that must take place, no remedy for the misunderstanding in the trenches, all a thing of art for children of all ages in the ensuing darkness, but the speed of light is a demonstrable constant.

None of that escaped Andre Sennwald of the New York Times because he never beheld it, “a happy adventure in sentimental romance.” Just the same in Variety, “a sockeroo woman’s picture.” Tom Milne in Time Out Film Guide upon reflection has “lush Goldwyn weepie,” and Halliwell’s Film Guide “tearstained melodrama” (citing The Times, “may suddenly cause the most hardened intellects to dissolve before the most obvious sentimentality”).

The pious Saturday breakfast is from The Barretts of Wimpole Street.