Word: gwenn
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...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...
...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...
Sheppey (well played by Edmund Gwenn) is a perky London barber who wins ?8,500 in a sweepstakes, decides to give his money to the poor, begins by bringing home a streetwalker and a thief. From there on the cynic and ironist in Maugham have a field day. Sheppey, his family feels sure, must be off his chump. The harlot and the thief, bored stiff by the good life, scamper back to the bad one. For a final joker, Maugham shows that the exemplary Sheppey really is sick: he has been having visions of a strange woman, who turns...
...faults to be found in the picture are few and far between. The situation under which Lassie is sold is a bit over-used, and parts of the show are saccharine sweet. But, to counterbalance that, there are some excellent characterizations. Edmund Gwenn has done a fine performance as the proprietor of a traveling show and shop. Donald Crisp is conventional but natural as the father, Elsa Lanchester quite good as the mother, but Nigel Bruce a bit under par as the Lord of the Manor and purchaser of Lassie...