Word: cronyn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...walks away with the picture is Richard Haydn, who plays the mean-souled apothecary with style enough for Hamlet. Haydn is more & more clearly one of that group of supporting players (Hume Cronyn is another) who make American movies worth adult attention...
...surest and most honest handlers of melodrama (Bataan, The Cross of Lorraine). Its chief players, Garfield and Turner, are box-office naturals. The forlornly prosperous roadside menage is an excellent set and there is, throughout, an unusual feeling for mannerism, place and atmosphere. The supporting work of Hume Cronyn and Leon Ames as lawyers is so good it. knocks a hole right through the picture...
Robert Shannon, hero of A. J. Cronin's story (little Dean Stockwell and, later on, Tom Drake), is an Irish Catholic orphan, adopted by a Scottish Protestant family. The father (Hume Cronyn), a penny-pinching petty tyrant, sells the child's sole heirloom, a velocipede. The grandmother (Gladys Cooper), a termagant, makes him a green flower-sprigged suit out of a petticoat. The great-grandfather (Charles Coburn), a sort of marked-down Falstaff, heartlessly clips his toenails in the waif's face, but soon shows that this was mere gruffness. The schoolboys tease the orphan about...
...give the film its due: some elements-especially those which show the struggle of innocence against meanness-are sincerely felt and, in a lumbering, over-stacked way, sympathetically dramatized. There are some experienced performances, notably those of Messrs. Cronyn and Coburn. There are some pleasant appearances: bashful Tom Drake and Beverly Tyler, a good-looking newcomer with a sweet soprano, and eyes a trifle too tricky for her role. The Solemn High Mass and First Communion will move many-and suggest to others that if cinema carries this sort of thing much farther, theaters will have to be consecrated...
Some of the situations are tried, true and a little tired. But the Rumanian siren, speaking sonorously in a participial dialect of her own, is a fresh creation; and Hume Cronyn's Freddie Potts might be something straight out of the early Booth Tarkington. Slim Robert Walker is wholly likable as the husband. June Allyson is a model little bride, especially when she sidles up to her man with an icebox tray in her hand and says with a happy sigh, "Our first ice cubes...