Word: bassermann
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...fact, Hollywood's most strenuous effort, to date, to mix a box-office Mickey Finn out of these disparate ingredients: topical tragedy, pulmotored patriotism, slick-paper romance, and anything-for-a-laugh comedy. There are moments when Director McCarey has the sleight of hand it takes. Albert Bassermann makes a small prize package of a fierce, old Polish general. Pudgy Walter Slezak, as the dastardly baron, is as slickly untrustworthy as a bomb in aspic. But Principals Rogers and Grant exude a general impression that they know something has gone very wrong, and that nothing much can be done...
Maugham told this high-colored tale in a series of flashbacks narrated by an author (in the picture, Herbert Marshall), a doctor (Albert Bassermann) and others who knew the great man. The device worked out well enough in print. On the screen it is all but disastrous-especially since Adaptor-Director Albert Lewin has Maugham's book read, obbligato, almost word for word. The reading is excellent, but it freezes the action into little more than a set of magic-lantern slides...
Escape (Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Nazimova, Conrad Veidt, Blanche Yurka, Albert Bassermann; TIME...
...drag on indefinitely being just too, too documentary about everything. Edward G. Robinson as Julius Reuter and Edna Best as his wife try in vain to sell their sickening sentimentality as old world charm. Mr. Robinson should stick to gangsters instead of dabbling in the German bourgeoisie. And Mr. Bassermann could also be a little less Continental and a little more convincing in his part...
...have only talked of Mr. Hitchcock, and it is not quite unjustified that this should be so. For, however capable the performances of Joel McCrea and Albert Bassermann, however funny the prating of Robert Benchley, they are all but puppets in the Master's hands. Likewise the wild story about the kidnapping of a Dutch statesman by a Nazi spy-ring is more form than contents. The only concession to reality is the final appeal to the United States to steel herself against aggression a scene of piercing terror which shows Mr. Hitchcock still in firm control. To the very...
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