Word: glossing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Heiress (Paramount) is a handsomely mounted, sumptuously acted film about a wallflower whose only social grace is a neat hand at embroidery. Directed and produced by William Wyler (Wuttiering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives), The Heiress bears the Wyler trademark of painstaking high gloss. It is also a solid and impressive movie aimed at adults...
Despite its high Hollywood gloss, the story is told with considerable honesty and understated force. It will therefore doubtless irritate both professional Southerners and professional champions of racial equality. Back to her native South goes a white-skinned Negro girl (Jeanne Grain), who has "passed" in the North while studying nursing. In her home town, she is first terrified, then furious, at the treatment she gets as a Negro. It is not long until she comes close to being robbed by a fellow Negro, and raped by white men. Torn between running back North to her white doctor fiance (William...
Surely, it is at least as much to the credit of Writer Ardrey as Producer Berman and Director Minelli that the picture "stoutly refused to spice up the sin or gloss over the grimness of Emma's life . . ." If writers were not such forgotten men in Hollywood [you might have] a few more good pictures . . . to list as Current & Choice...
Much to their credit Producer Pandro Berman and Director Vincente Minelli have stoutly refused to spice up the sin or gloss over the grimness of Emma's life. Instead, at a leisurely and often-lagging pace they have pried into every nook & cranny of Emma's avid, neurotic soul and the drab existence that nourished it. The handling of bumbling peasants and pompous tradesmen has an acid authority. One memorable scene-a whirling, overheated ball at a local château-is a wonderfully skillful projection of Emma's half-swooning sense of her own seductiveness...
...only real fun to be had from the belaboring of this plot comes from Ronald Reagan, who rarely gets a crack at light comedy. He does a good job of giving some old gags a new gloss; and masquerading as an immigrant student in one of Schoolmarm Mayo's naturalization classes, he gets off an excellent range of muddled European accents. Brightest piece of invention: a bit of hot-weather Americana, in which the sound track picks up the nasal lovemaking of a Brooklyn couple in the moonlit shadows of Jones Beach...