Word: actor
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Full of fine tall tales, Aquilon is itself a sadly skinny one. Playwright Aumont obviously wrote it as a gift for Actor Aumont. Adapter Barry did nothing to take it away. While Aumont is sloshing his emphatic charm all over the stage, the script is dousing everything with tedious chatter. Consoling but not countervailing is the quieter charm of Cinemactress Palmer...
Richard III (by William Shakespeare; produced by Herman Levin) is one of Shakespeare's poorer plays but plushier stage pieces. So incessantly and ostentatiously villainous is the deformed, usurping Richard that down the centuries the role has been a temptation for every gaudy actor and a triumph for a number of good ones...
Richard III is prentice Shakespeare (some have argued that it is not all his) and in it the early Bard catches only the surfaces of evil. But he gives Richard two thoroughly vivid characteristics: a malign, gloating wit and a flamboyant love of effect. The role is an actor's dream because Richard is himself forever acting-throwing not a dark veil but a bright light round his hypocrisies, welcoming, not wincing at his bloody crimes. Seldom has there been such joy of villainy...
None of the cast bothers to play it straight. Apparently happiest in his spoofing is Irish Actor Arthur Shields, who slyly caricatures the screen mannerisms of his more famous brother, Barry Fitzgerald (whose real name is William Shields...
...when roadbeds were rough and railroading rougher, Preston winds up on the villains' or losing side. There are some handsomely photographed train wrecks, but except for Frank Faylen's lynx-eyed portrait of a killer, Whispering Smith is a conventional western in every detail. Its only novelty: Actor Ladd, familiar as a sleekly tough urban type, carrying two guns and looking pretty uncomfortable as they flap around his chaps...