vincentlynch-moonoi Alright. I'll say it right out of the gate. This film proves why our former President was not one of the great actors. He was a run-of-the-mill good actor, although admittedly he turned in a couple of surprises in films. This is not one of them. He plays an average guy here in an average performance. But, it works. He's believable.On the other hand, I'm not so sure the ditzy, but lovable character Eleanor Parker plays is as believable. I'm not criticizing her acting, just the role.Put the two together and you have a little romantic comedy that may hold your attention for 103 minutes.The real gem of a performance here is the brassy Eve Arden, who -- with her sarcasm -- can steal just about any scene in any film.I'm giving this film a shaky "7". In part because an awfully lot of time is spent proving to us that Parker's character is ditzy. That was obvious early on. At least this is a very different role for Parker, and usually she's an actress I enjoyed very much.

David Allen "Ronald Reagan: Centennial Collection" (2011) is the most complete collection yet of Reagan's movies, but 2 more should be added.His very first movie, in which he had only a tiny part as a radio interviewer trying to get time with a Hollywood movie star (and failing), was "Hollywood Hotel" (1937) starring Dick Powell, which movie was famous for the signature song "Hooray For Hollywood."Reagan came to Hollywood in the middle 1930's after a short career as a radio announcer and sports broadcaster in Iowa after his graduation in 1932 from Eureka College in Illinois.Radio was just coming into its own in the middle 1930's and was very interesting as a subject to movie audiences. People wanted to see what radio was about "behind the scenes." Many late 1930's Hollywood movies showed that, and sold a lot of tickets because of it.Many "radio" movies were made in the late 1930's. Bob Hope's signature song title "Thanks For The Memory" was from a radio movie titled "The Big Broadcast Of 1938" and Hope himself became a Hollywood star only after he achieved radio stardom in the late 1930's.Ronald Reagan was a former radio pro who got beginning actor work because of his radio experience. He could be useful for "radio movies," and was hired.Hollywood film studios made many movies about the then glamorous radio business and the world of radio celebrities.Reagan was a handsome, articulate young man who had studied dramatics in college (he majored in Sociology but participated in many school plays in lead roles), and actually had experience as a radio broadcaster.The latter credential got him a contract with Warner Brothers, and his first role in "Hollywood Hotel" (1937) showed Reagan doing what he had done in Iowa....radio interviewing. His radio interview experience got him "in the door" to the world of Hollywood acting for big studios.His "Hollywood Hotel" (1937) role (uncredited but important for any interested in his movie actor career) is important to include in any history of Reagan's movie actor work.Reagan also starred in a movie re-make of one of Broadway's longest running plays, "The Voice Of The Turtle," (1947) which was a good movie well done, and re-released at a later time with the title "One For The Book."Re-makes of important Broadway plays were often done in Hollywood over it's history, and most of the resulting movie were good...took advantage of good material easy to turn into a good movie."The Voice Of The Turtle" (1947) starring Ronald Reagan is an example of this, and should be included in any collection showing important movie work he did.Voice Of The Turtle (1947), later released with a different name: "One For The Book", is a very well presented movie with great actor work from stars Ronald Reagan and Eleanor Parker, assisted by Eve Arden, three talented movie stars of the middle 20th Century.The movie is especially interesting and worthwhile because it showcases one of the biggest Broadway (NYC NY USA) stage hits of the middle 1940's, written by John Van Druten....the show played on the Broadway stage non-stop from 1943 through 1947.....5 years.One of those stage play titles one sees when "Longest Running Plays Ever Produced" lists are provided in stage play history books.Most of the show takes place in a single one bedroom apt. (the romantic female lead's NYC upper East Side Manhattan digs) with half a dozen departures for short periods to NYC places young, handsome singles of those 1940's times were part of....chic French restaurants where meals started with Vichisois (cold Leek Soup) and ended with Crepe Suzettes (ultra thin pancakes doused with Grand Marnier orange flavored brandy made up and served table-side by a tuxedoed waiter with a charming smile and foreign accent).....empty theater stages where new plays auditioned new hopeful actresses...NYC elegant night clubs with live orchestras and well dressed, mannerly patrons, all good dancers....The whole show is worth seeing for many reasons, but one is that an entire culture and way of life now long gone, and with it civility, manners, etiquette, and genuine social charm.....is depicted for all to see, marvel at, and lament the passing of.A well done 2004 video documentary titled Broadway The Golden Age interviews NYC actors of fame who worked during the 1940's through the 1970's and recalled how it all went, what it all was about, and most especially decried the fact what they had all be part of was now (in 2004 and after) gone forever, and not replaced by better performing art and memorable, human stagecraft.Voice Of The Turtle (1947) shows in movie form what the stage-play presented to theater goers (I write this in 2012, and if a 20 year old attended the first 1943 presentations in NYC of this show, he or she would be 88 this year!).I join many others in cheering this wonderful and forgotten play and movie, worth getting, worth seeing.----------------- Written by Tex Allen, SAG-AFTRA movie actor. Visit WWW.IMDb.Me/TexAllen for more information about Tex Allen. Tex Allen's email address is [email protected] Tex Allen Movie Credits, Biography, and 2012 photos at WWW.IMDb.Me/TexAllen. See other Tex Allen written movie reviews....almost 100 titles.... at: "http://imdb.com/user/ur15279309/comments" (paste this address into your URL Browser)

tarmcgator This 1948 Warner Brothers release was based on a Broadway play that had opened in December 1943 and closed only weeks before the movie premiered. The central issues of the film are a mix of the up-to-date and the outdated -- fear of commitment, as well as the propriety of "intergender cohabitation."In an era when proper young ladies didn't discuss sex with proper young gentlemen -- at least, not in movies sanctioned by the Hayes Office -- THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE was a bit risqué, which helped account for its long run on Broadway. The fear of what other people might think about a nice girl offering a spare bed to an attractive young man in uniform, even during the housing shortages of World War II, was not foreign to a lot of Americans, especially women, as the war put a strain on the nation's sexual mores and values. Among those born since the 1940s, that kind of innocent gesture might be taken for granted as an act of kindness, with no sexual overture implied by the woman. The scene in which Sally and Bill frantically try to prevent Olive from finding out that he's come to her apartment that morning to have breakfast with her may seem silly (though it is funny), but Sally knows that if Olive finds Bill there at breakfast, Olive will immediately assume "the worst." (I also anticipated that, if Bill was discovered, Sally's subsequent "reputation" might cause her to become an even more tempting target for the aging stage lothario with whom she's been cast in a play, but that little tete-a-tete occurs off-stage/off-camera.) It was still the 1940s, and in those days, people WOULD talk. (Some people STILL do.)Fear of commitment is still with us. Unfortunately, here the film doesn't succeed very well, perhaps because, again, of Hollywood's self-censorship. We get a little information about Sally's disappointing relationship with a theatrical producer (which, the context implies, did become sexual), but the allusions to Bill's pain about lost love are weak. (At one point he encounters his old lover in a nightclub, but we never learn anything more about her, or them.) The delicate minuet that Sally and Bill dance around their immediate attraction to one another is what drives the story, but (not having the seen or read the play) I have a strong sense that Van Druten's original addressed their dilemma more directly than his Hayes Office-vetted screenplay.No doubt self-censorship also undercut the more brazenly promiscuous aspects of Olive, though Eve Arden does a fine job with what she is given to work with. In fact the cast is one of the things that makes this film still worth watching. Eleanor Parker does well in conveying Sally's uncertainty about love, and whatever you think of Ronald Reagan's later political activities, he effectively portrays the essential decency of Bill. Actors Wayne Morris, Kent Smith, and those who play a host of other supporting characters (none of them in the original stage version) also are effective.THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE is best approached as a period piece, a time capsule of how Americans viewed awakening love in a changing wartime culture. For all the restraints imposed by the Hayes Office, it remains worth an occasional viewing.

bmacv With snow falling softly over a back-lot Manhattan, and a French boîte where a Benedictine bottle holds the shade for a table lamp, how can anybody resist The Voice of the Turtle (Irving Rapper's adaptation of the John Van Druten stage hit, reissued as One for the Book)? It's a bit of romantic fluff set on the home front during the Second World War that somehow survives into the new millennium with much of its artifice and most of its charm intact.Circumstances throw together struggling young actress Eleanor Parker, on the rebound, and furloughed serviceman Ronald Reagan, who has just been daintily dumped by Eve Arden. Since hotel rooms are hard to come by on rainy nights in wartime, Reagan ends up spending the night on a studio bed in Parker's apartment. And the inevitable happens – they fall in love.That's just about all there is to it, allowing for some excursions into the New York theater world. But the cast, none of whom was on Hollywood's A-list at the time, gives it their best. This was the sort of amiable, easy-going role that Reagan played best, from the movies to the White House. Parker (in a dreadful hairdo) seems a little tense in the ditzy part of an ingenue with a slight obsessive-compulsive disorder, but ultimately she wins us over. Best of all is Arden, for once not a vinegar virgin but a high-fashion woman-about-town who's possessive about the multiple men in her life only when she's about to lose them. All told, The Voice of the Turtle is a somewhat faded sachet that brings back nostalgic memories of a 1940s Manhattan that probably never existed – but makes it fun to daydream that maybe once it did.