Word: calhern
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...Astarte (Hollywood version) is the direct ancestor of present-day burlesque: High Priestess Lana, wearing as few beads as the Production Code, will permit, promenades along a runway above her audience, using every classic nuance of the stripteaser's hesitation walk while, as comedy relief, High Priest Louis Calhern lurches onstage in a funny hat and baggy costume, just like an oldtime Dutch comic at Minsky...
...review of the motion picture Blackboard Jungle, I am intrigued by the pronouncement that "Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years [March 21]". While I am considerably short of 30 years in high-school service, I have inhaled a great deal of that insidious white stuff which produces "the secret decay." (Laymen may not know that some times after a concussion of erasers on the blackboard, the familiar mushroom cloud of dust rises high in the air and results in heavy fallout many feet from the point...
...part of Dadier. His portrayal falters only in certain scenes, as in his return to his old college, where the script leads him down with so many lines of platitudinous garbage that he could scarcely he expected to carry them off well. Among his colleagues at the school. Louis Calhern is bitter but human as a disillusioned history teacher, while Margaret Haves reads her way through a very hollow portryal of a pretty and frustrated schoolteacher who tempts circumstances too much...
Blackboard Jungle (M-G-M). "Don't be a hero," says the old teacher (Louis Calhern) to the new teacher (Glenn Ford), "and never turn your back to the class." Ford, an idealistic young man who hopes, as a teacher, to "shape minds, sculpt lives," looks puzzled. He knows that North Manual High School is "the garbage can of the educational system" of the big U.S. city he lives in, but is the situation really as bad as all that? He finds out that...
Cinematically, Blackboard Jungle is no great shakes. The camera work is commonplace and the emotional pace limps. The actors do better. Glenn Ford is a believable symbol of two-fisted do-goodism; Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years. Better still are the students themselves, some of whom were borrowed from their desks in the Los Angeles public school system. The sense of them there in the background has obviously provided a true emotional standard to which the professional actors, notably Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow, could repair...