Word: crawford
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess...
...central character, a backwoods idealist who becomes a one-man state government, is hard-centered, soft-surfaced Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford). His life story is told in choppy, dramatic incidents, which give the movie a curious pattern-Stark at the football stadium, Stark haranguing a fairgrounds crowd, Stark bulldozing the legislators, Stark posing for cameramen with his estranged family. The small, disconnected scenes hit the eye with the repetitive impact of telephone poles seen from a fast train, and din the main character deep into the mind...
...Rossen's efforts to keep Stark from being a facsimile of the late Huey Long often turn the character into a colorless man who lacks the political charm of a people's favorite and looks like a cross between a schoolteacher and a gangster. But when Actor Crawford is allowed to swing around in the role, he has some fine scenes-notably, the seedy politico resting off a nightlong drunk in a playground swing, gesturing the children to go off and leave him alone...
...Stark, the city's sheriff as the sheriff, a local preacher as the preacher. In the big crowd scene just before Willie Stark's assassination, he turned four cameras loose at once on Stockton's non-professional extras to get their unrehearsed reactions to Crawford's speech...
...Some people will remember Mr. Crawford as the militant industrialist who challenged the efforts of the wartime National Labor Relations to stifle free speech on the apart of employers," Cole said...