Word: hutton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movies, fresh from beltin' 'em out on Broadway, Hutton seemed unaware the camera she was playing to wasn't in the upper balcony, it was as close as a lover; or that movies had perfected a sound system that carried her voice into the theaters. So she sold every word, every note, every gesture, as if she were on a mountaintop and the audience down in the valley. "Watching her in action," TIME wrote in the Hutton cover story, "has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker...
...This extreme-rendition style went against the grain of the Hollywood '40s, when actors tended to whisper their threats and endearments, and the film noir aesthetic insured that movie sets had no more lighting than today's Baghdad after curfew. Not Hutton: she stuck her face into the nearest klieg light and shouted her lines and lyrics, cascaded all that talent and adrenaline...
...hard to find a Hutton equivalent among her contemporaries, let alone now. Danny Kaye poured comic pizzazz into his tongue-twisting tunes, but had a hard time with ballads. Martha Raye did a lot of broad comedy, but without Betty's fresh-scrubbed glamour. Doris Day was another band-singer blond gone Hollywood, but with a more conventional softness. Only Betty had the whole package. She was vivacious, pretty, a Nobel-dynamite-winning thrush, an appealing actress who excelled in comedy and, if a director could just tamp down her pile-driving instincts, drama. TIME, searching for the portmanteau...
...true star is someone who can bring in the crowds no matter how flimsy the vehicle or anonymous the surrounding players. Most of Hutton's movies, which typically cast her as the good-time gal whose bravado masks her innocence, were at best inconsequential; and her costars in these modest endeavors ranged from grouchy John Lund to the craggy leprechaun Barry Fitzgerald, from hysterical geek Eddie Bracken to bulky Sonny Tufts. (Sonny Tufts??) The paucity of registered masterpieces of complementary star power simply proved her appeal. Audiences paid to see her propriety-defying shenanigans, in the implicit belief that...
...That's not an unwarranted exaggeration about a performer whose forte was unwarranted exaggeration. She came out of the big band era but thrashed about like a rock star. What Elvis Presley did with his hips, Hutton did with her entire body. She didn't stand behind the mike; she ran amok across the stage, once torpedoing off it and landing on the drummer in the orchestra pit. (Rim shot.) Life with Hutton was just as perilous in Hollywood. She cracked three ribs getting tossed about by acrobats in the movie Incendiary Blonde. Her exuberance often injured her co-stars...