Word: boyers
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Confidential Agent (Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall, Katina Paxinou; TIME...
...since. There he has quietly revolutionized makeup. First he invented the panchromatic base, a tan cream which would evenly reflect all lights, thus keep faces or lips from fading out. Then came the "hair lace wig," which added years of professional life to balding oldsters like Bing Crosby, Charles Boyer, Jack Benny and Fred Astaire, and molded rubber faces for Frankenstein's monster & Mr. Hyde. He also devised a foolproof method for other make-up men to use. He catalogued all women's faces in five basic types, i.e., Claudette Colbert has a "diamond" face, Ann Sheridan...
Incorrigible cinemaddicts may insist on regarding Charles Boyer as a romantic figure-even in his shabby overcoat and battered hat. But the hero of Confidential Agent is far from a stock heroic figure. He is middleaged, greying, easily winded and persistent rather than brave. A Spanish Loyalist soldier whose wife and child have been killed, he is sent on a confidential mission to England in 1937 to keep a shipment of coal out of the Nationalists' hands. He is beaten up, shot at and framed for murder. He is chased up dusty stairways and down drab, foggy alleys...
...Algiers" in 1938, is in most ways a better picture than its carbon copy. United Artists knew a good thing when they saw it, and they took large chunks--still recognizable shots, and in some cases apparently the very same sets--of the French original as a backdrop for Boyer, Lamarr, Sigrid Gurie, and Gene Lockbart...
That Hody Lamarr is the most beautiful woman in the world is a debatable point; she certainly is not the actress Ingrid Bergman was in the same part. Charles Boyer tried to drive Ingrid mad in "Gaslight" to gain her wealth. Similarly accented Paul Lukas tries to pull the same stunt in "Experiment Perilous," but with no apparent motive. Almost as a trick ending, it develops that a page has been substituted in this carbon copy: Lukas is mentally unsound, which doesn't really change much...