1 776 most likely cannot fail, since it has these gulping, throat-clogging feelings for the suckers. i suppose this can be a motion picture fifty four for humans just like the Sally Kellerman nurse in M•A •S•H earlier than she snapped out of it - for the standard military downs and their liberal-down cousins. Why else are the 2 ladies became lyrical, hair-flowing Jeanette MacDonalds, so soft-focus, ultra-wonderful female that you're feeling Sigmund Romberg will upward thrust and write "One on my own" yet again? W. C. Fields could have eaten them either for breakfast. Blythe Danner is lovely, and Ken Howard is a bit more constrained than lots of the others, yet what does it subject? The dumb, crusty jocularity had me shrinking in my seat. the total damned factor has the emasculated, giggly tone that passes for dean relations leisure; it may well pass directly to acquire thousands and acquire awards. Can this exhibit relatively please multitudes of american citizens? Have we misplaced the means for figuring out whilst we are in­ sulted? .. ,,H E FRED ASTAIRE & GINGER ROGERS booklet, " by means of Arlene Croce, has verve , and wit, just like the sequence of musicals it covers. motion picture feedback suffered a loss whilst, within the mid-sixties, pass over Croce deserted the sphere and gave such a lot of her energies to bounce feedback; now she has joined her significant abilities. not anyone has ever defined dance in videos the best way she does: she's a slangy, based author; her compressed descriptions are evocative and analytic while, and so special and clean that whereas bringing the excitement of the dances again she provides to it. there's a experience of strain in her sort that has whatever just like the stress and pull of the dances themselves. Her descriptions are unique and imperi­ best friend brusque in a manner that retains the reader alert; one responds to her writing kinesthetically, as though it have been dance. This small e-book, released this week via Outerbridge & Lazard, and approximately part textual content, part picture­ graphs (with Hip-page dances, of which one is efficacious, the opposite badly cropped) , is a historical past of the crew and an evaluation of its position in dance and film historical past, and in addition an acute exam of ways videos have been made within the factory-system days. We study who did what on these musicals and the way they "happened," and but, simply as Astaire by no means helps you to see the exertions, in order that his dances seem to be spontaneous, leave out Croce does not current the historical past as heritage; she shall we it are available casually, jauntily, as she covers the sequence of movies, becoming the historical past fabric to the illustrated part on each one motion picture. there are occasions whilst one might want her to extend on some degree or clarify, however the gift of her brevity is similar accomplished nonchalance that she prizes in those video clips; it comes out of her managed ecstatic reaction to the dances. here's a sentence of omit Croce's on Astaire within the "I will not Dance" quantity from Roberta: fifty five Two tremendous Cossacks need to hold him protesting onto the dance flooring, and there he does his longest and such a lot soaking up solo of the sequence to this point, packed with stork-legged steps on toe, wheeling pirouettes during which he appears winding one leg round the different, and people ratcheting faucet clusters that fall like unfastened swap from his wallet.