Word: fiends
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Student of High Life. Rubinstein was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest of seven children of a small manufacturer. By the time he was three, he was a "terrible little fiend" about music, screaming at his sisters when they struck a sour chord and banging the piano lid on their fingers to make them stop. Impressed with his son's possibilities, Papa Rubinstein bought him a child-sized violin. Artur promptly smashed it. Papa bought another, and Artur smashed that too. Papa gave up, let him concentrate on the then less fashionable piano...
...Tyrone family does not make a pretty picture. The mother (Inga Tidblad) is a dope fiend. The father is an actor (as O'Neill's father was) and a monumental skinflint. Jamie Tyrone is a wastrel and a drunkard like his father, and Edmund (Jarl Kulle), obviously patterned on O'Neill himself, is a consumptive. These four haunted characters spend their long day's journey into night gnawing at each other. They sit around the living room table drinking, talking, baring their minds, hating each other, yet cemented together in one miserable unit of family love...
Marx, a fresh-air fiend as well as culture fan, likes to bask in the sun on winter days at the bottom of his swimming pool, which is drained in September. There he sits puffing six-inch cigars (Jack & Charlie's "21" Selection), dictating letters to his Audiograph or reading a dictionary and marking the words and phrases he wants to transfer to his vocabulary. These are later typed by a secretary in a series of black books that Marx carries everywhere, studies in idle moments. For an hour, three or four times a week, he dons sneakers, a grey...
...seems unable to decide whether he is reading from a fairy tale or a police blotter. Sometimes the archness is laid on with a trowel, sometimes the trifling action stops dead for overdetailed explanations. Bogart plays his role pretty straight; Aldo Ray is disconcertingly elfin for an alleged sex fiend; and Ustinov's mugging seems overdone. Basil Rathbone and John Baer wander onscreen long enough to look properly villainous. Joan Bennett and Gloria Talbott add their pretty confusions to the artificial turmoil. Technicolor gives the picture a fairly handsome mounting, but nothing can rescue the story from too much...
...despite the camera tricks, engulfing shadows, dizzying vistas of colonnades and architectural arabesques, the film moves forward with a pulse-quickening stir and bustle. As the jealous Moor, Welles captures the falcon-look of a Kabyle from the Atlas Mountains; Michael McLiammoir plays a foul-fiend of an lago with reptilian intensity; and Suzanne Clothier as Desdemona, though not quite entrancing enough to "sing the savageness out of a bear," wins compassion as she is bewilderingly overwhelmed by her mate and fate...