Word: gwenn
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...Loretta Young (a bachelor girl) to the altar, the problem is to provide enough comedy antics to keep the customers awake until the wedding. Cinemactor Milland and the dummy head ("Chester") which he uses for his researches provide some of them. Gail Patrick (the girl Milland jilts) and Edmund Gwenn (the butler in The Earl of Chicago) provide some more. So does the technical chatter of some eminent psychologists. Observers are likely to be delighted when the romp is over...
Part of the credit for making this somersault admirably smooth instead of ridiculous belongs to Producer Victor Saville (Goodbye, Mr. Chips) and Director Richard Thorpe (Night Must Fall). Part belongs to British Actor Edmund Gwenn for a first-rate performance as the butler who is submissive, not subservient. But most of the entertainment in The Earl of Chicago, and that is plenty, is provided by Robert Montgomery's transformation of his playboy grin into a fixed moronic stare, his playboy titter into a loony hee-hee, his playboy aplomb into gangster arrogance...
...Arnold, a 100 per cent honest lawyer, whom Silky has previously framed and sent to Joliet for seven years. This is the background against which is thrown the concatenation of events leading to Silky's trial, conviction, and execution as the Earl of Galay. Arnold and British-born Edmund Gwenn support Montgomery superably, and amazingly enough there is hardly a woman's face in the entire 87 minutes of running time. This is no epic such as "The Grapes of Wrath," but in its unpretentious way it is well worth seeing. It'll give you an entirely new slant...
Sylvia Scarlett (RKO) reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than as a woman. Just why, in the plot, she has to become a boy is never clear; it is something about getting over to England with her father, Henry Scarlett (Edmund Gwenn). who wants to start life anew as a lace-smuggler. But once Miss Hepburn has her trousers on, and she and her inept, ingenuous miscreant of a parent have met Gary Grant, a cockney adventurer with smuggled diamonds in his bootheels. Sylvia Scarlett becomes good entertainment...
...Hester (Maureen O'Sullivan) and Donald (Norman Foster) to "get back the stolen papers." Walter Connolly made a great success as the Bishop in the Broadway version of Frederic Jackson's play last winter, but it is hard to believe that anyone could be as good as Edmund Gwenn is in this adaptation. He is even convincing when his Episcopalian relish for a nice little crime gets the young people into trouble and he has to turn dramatic to save them. Lucile Watson is the Bishop's sister, longtime president of the Primrose League, who knows...