Word: edisonizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Mickey got new fame and a new name when MGM released his most important picture to date - Young Tom Edison...
...took 75 years for the Lincoln legend to develop to the point where playing Abraham Lincoln (in Abe Lincoln in Illi nois) could be a peak in the career of an actor like Raymond Massey. The Edison legend is just beginning in the movies which Edison invented. What the rest of the legend would be like depended in part on who interpreted the first installment...
...Rooney was going to interpret a boy, who (like himself) began at the bottom of the American heap, (like himself) had to struggle, (like himself) won, but a boy whose main activity (unlike Mickey's) was investigating, inventing, thinking. Mickey Rooney not only had to make young Tom Edison plausible, he had to create the boyhood basis for a legendary manhood. He gave the role his most sober and restrained performance to date. That he did not succeed entirely was partly the fault of the production, partly because the picture featured Mickey in a role so different from...
Their quandary was not helped much by the producers' decision to make mildly misunderstood young Thomas Edison a sort of juvenile Arnold von Winkelried...
...boyhood does not seem enough to hold all the tortures the film Edison undergoes. If this picture has any influence on the Edison legend, the inventor of electric light will be thought of in future years as an inspired masochist...