Word: gwenn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Keys of the Kingdom (Gregory Peck, Edmund Gwenn, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Rosa Stradner; TIME, January...
...sort of great man, humble, slow-minded, naive and brave, who never realizes his own greatness. At the beginning, in a Scottish village, he has no desire to take holy orders. He is brought to it by his sweetheart's death and by a benign old Monsignor (Edmund Gwenn) who talks, not too urgently, about the will of God. It is this same mentor who sends the young priest, when he has come to regard himself as a hopeless failure, a thousand miles deep into 19th-Century China, to install himself in a leaky stable near a ruined church...
There are many good performances in The Keys-notably the sharply etched ecclesiastical portraits of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price and Edmund Gwenn, and the disciplined, powerful performance of Austrian Rosa Stradner, a screen newcomer, as the nun. But the picture's biggest, toughest role is remarkably handled by 28-year-old Gregory Peck. He combines a bearing and demeanor that a matinee idol might envy (rather suggesting a sandpapered Lincoln) with a dominant naturalness. It is not surprising that he has no theatrical ancestry-his father is a San Diego druggist...
...before, and many of its ideas have been repeated in such films as "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" and "A Guy Named Joe." Warner Brothers' current re-make is a bit too well cast, for in order to do justice to Paul Henreid, John Garfield, Sidney Greenstreet, George Coulouris, Edmund Gwenn, and a host of others, they have made a haunting idea into a long and talky picture...
...King), a merchant mariner (George Tobias), an industrialist (George Coulouris), a charwoman (Sara Allgood), a pair of cultivated suicides (Paul Henreid, Eleanor Parker). Nearly all the parts are well played, though as individuals and as moral and social symbols, the characters seem over-genteel, stagily conceived, dated. But Edmund Gwenn is a competently ghostly steward, Sydney Greenstreet a subtly alarming embodiment of the Last Judgment. And compared with recent bows to the Beyond-a .cheerful Chiclet like A Guy Named Joe, a quiet sniffle over the aspidistras like Happy Land, a jumbo box of mentholated Kleenex like Tender Comrade-this...