Word: inns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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White Christmas (Paramount) is a sentimental recollection of the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, in which Bing Crosby first sang the song White Christmas. From the first scene (Christmas 1944) to the last (Christmas 1954), it is blatantly the I "big musical," a big fat yam of a picture richly candied with VistaVision (Paramount's answer to CinemaScope), Technicolor, tunes by Irving Berlin, massive production numbers, and big stars. Unfortunately, the yam is still...
...stage as Mimi in Puccini's La Bohème. She reminded one critic of Italy's "gorgeous-looking, immensely skillful actresses," surprised everyone when her warm singing and touching performance equaled her looks. In her second opera, a sunny revival of Cherubim's The Portuguese Inn, the San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein called her "the very incarnation of youthful feminine grace and vivacity." Even before she had appeared in her other roles (in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Massenet's Manon), the San Francisco Opera decided to invite her back next season...
Laughton, of course, has hacked a large hole for himself in the theatre world, and the Inn's Squire Pengallen is a character comfortably fitted within its boundaries. A bulbous villain with the dining habits of Henry VIII and the heart of Captain Bligh, the Squire lives in opulence while anonymously leading a gang of shipwreckers. Laughton makes him a polished old rogue, who cheerfully entertains his victims with superb and comically obvious hypocrisy...
Laughton's gusty humour has had an amazing durability. His co-star, Maureen O'Hara, might also boast of her consistency throughout the years. Jamaica Inn proves conclusively that she was just as inept in 1939 as she is today. In the role of an Irish lass whose innocence is only overshadowed by her muscle, Miss O'Hara's acting is a pantomime with words...
...blustery course. Robert Newton, as the law officer, and Emlyn Williams, a pirate, can do little more to support a disjointed script sagging mainly from the over-productive imagination of authoress Daphne du Maurier. Both the screen play and the acting proceed at a hurricane pitch, which makes Jamaica Inn seem considerably older than its tender fifteen years...