Word: flashback
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...flashback, the picture tells of Williams' 1921 conviction for the killing of a Prohibition officer during a raid on a North Carolina moonshine still, his experiences in solitary and on a back-breaking chain gang, his development of a lightweight, short-stroke carbine, using only automobile and tractor axles, a fence post, hacksaw and handfile in a prison blacksmith shop.*The happy ending: his pardon...
Belles on Their Toes (20th Century-Fox), a sequel to 1950's successful Cheaper by the Dozen* is, like most follow-ups, somewhat of a letdown. Present once more are Efficiency Expert Lillian Gilbreth (Myrna Loy) and her twelve lovable but strenuous children. The rambling scenario, in a flashback to the Pierce-Arrow and Charleston days of the '20s, focuses on the girls of the family...
Just about the only thing missing from this marshmallow melange of Technicolor, tunes, slapstick and sentiment is Clifton Webb, the original Pa Gilbreth, who passed on in Cheaper by the Dozen. In Belles, Webb is seen only in a brief flashback from the earlier film. Unfortunately, he and his acid personality could not be around for the rest of the movie to help counteract the saccharin goings...
Back on Gallup. For the remaining months of his life, he grubs for the answers in the memory heap of five decades, and talks his flashback findings into a tape recorder. As Jeff's soliloquy unreels on the pages of Author Carl Jonas' novel (a February Book-of-the-Month Club choice), it unwraps not a man but a mummy. For Jeff Selleck has not sprung from the soil of the creative imagination; he has been raised from the dust of the literary graveyard. He is a latter-day George Babbitt a westernized George Apley, a bewildered Willy...
...theater-wise and drama-foolish. Necessarily lacking the fullness of the book, it much less excusably lacks the bite. The second act is an overlong flashback that reduces Charles's whole past to a magazine-fiction romance without appreciably illuminating the present. The third act is just an exercise in suspense over whether Charles will be made vice president...