Word: beggar
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Director vonSternberg keeps interest and excitement high throughout the picture, however, by an old, Confucius-like beggar, who masters the minor fault of being totally blind by telling all the characters what the rest are doing at any given moment. The audience sits, fascinated to the end, wondering how he did it. But with a shrewd twist, in which the director daringly departed from formula six, the movie never explains this feat, thus keeping the audience in suspense even after the lights...
...Manhattan, where he is still playing Caesar one night and Antony the next, Sir Laurence Olivier was spending part of his offstage time taking singing lessons. His next job will be playing Captain Macheath in a movie version of The Beggar's Opera, his first serious singing role on either stage or screen...
...Young and the Damned (Oscar Dancigers; Mayer-Kingsley) are a gang of savage slum children running wild on the outskirts of Mexico City, where they steal, beat up a blind beggar, attack a legless man and commit murder. Filmed in Mexico as Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones), the picture was directed by Spam's onetime surrealist Moviemaker Luis Bunuel and photographed by Mexico's famed Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. The Young and the Damned is in the raw, realistic tradition of such classic juvenile-delinquency movies as the Russian Road to Life, the American Wild Boys of the Road...
...garbage heaps where people scrounge for food like animals. The acting, by a cast that is largely amateur, is as nakedly authentic as the settings, particularly in the performance of Roberto Cobo as Jaibo, the frighteningly cruel leader of the gang, and Miguel Inclan as the old blind beggar who intones a litany of hate for the boys, "One less, one less," as Jaibo is shot down by the police...
...course, there are other actors in this ten-year-old adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel--Thomas Mitchell is excellent as the Beggar King of backstreet Paris, even Maureen O'Hara is adequate as a gypsy dancer who violates some sort of 16th century McCarran Act and gets the Dungeon in return. For my money, though, it's Laughton all the way. His sardonic leer and characteristic aplomb steal the show whether he is abducting a woman, riding gleefully on the swinging church bells, or swooping down from the sky to save Miss O'Hara from the hangman's noose...