Word: isobel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thus spake the 17th Century's Isobel Gowdie, a Scots peasant who confessed her practices as a witch in language as fanciful as one of her great contemporaries, Poet Robert Herrick. Isobel (whom the authorities first hanged, then burned for safe measure) is one of the highlights of Christina Hole's scholarly, sober history of English witchcraft.* Her familiarity with it began when her old nurse destroyed her milk teeth as fast as they fell out, to keep them from evil hands...
...pity for the helpless. He fails to close his deals with certain other clients too. He makes several brilliantly funny attempts on the life of rambunctious Martha Raye, but she was born lucky and is plainly indestructible. He nibbles interminably toward the heart and pocketbook of rich, socialite Widow Isobel Elsom-and is all but caught in his hazardous career as he is about to marry...
...pure feeling, and of observation. The set pieces of pure slapstick are as skilled and delightful, and as psychologically penetrating, as any Chaplin has ever contrived. The casting (including Victim Margaret .Hoffman) is excellent and there are a couple of dozen fine pieces of characterization and acting, notably by Isobel Elsom and Martha Raye. Working with a new character, and adapting his old, mute artfulness to a medium new and basically hostile to him, Chaplin still has his sure virtuosity; his is one of the most beautiful single performances ever put on film...
Handel: Messiah (Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Malcolm Sargent conducting; Huddersfield Choral Society, with Isobel Baillie, soprano, Gladys Ripley, contralto, James Johnston, tenor and Norman Walker, basso; Columbia, two albums-38 sides, $22.50). An outstanding performance but not quite as good as the version done by Sir Thomas Beecham more than 15 years ago. Performance: orchestra and chorus, excellent; soloists, fair...
...passenger list includes: a cynical journalist (John Garfield), a high-society snob (Isobel Elsom), her humble husband (Gilbert Emery), a golddigger (Faye Emerson), a country clergyman (Dennis 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...