Word: joans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Limit (RKO-Radio) whips Fred Astaire, Joan Leslie and Robert Benchley together with some other promising ingredients, then collapses into equal parts of mild pleasure and disappointment. Most cinemusicals are so large, loud and splendid that seeing one is like trying to eat a wedding cake singlehanded. The Sky's the Limit is rather short (89 minutes), rather unspectacular (there are no chorus numbers), rather quiet (three suave tunes...
Above Suspicion (M.G.M.) is something new in Joan Crawford pictures. Instead of setting a special table for her saucer-eyed talents, it all but relegates Miss Crawford to playing stooge to pouty Fred MacMurray. Still worse, Joan's usually endless array of hats is reduced to a bare subsistence level...
...screen story, to be sure, is middling silly, with George Murphy stumping around with white-of-egg on his temples, looking about as middle-aged as a popular halfback in the high-school drama, and Joan Leslie rather brutally strong-arming his "son," Lieut. Ronald Reagan, into a war wedding. But even such stuff has its curious, warm appropriateness, and once the show proper gets marching to the ir resistible extroversions of military brass, you can hear nothing else, least of all your own second thoughts. Some high points...
This time Joan Fontaine is Tessa, the nubile nymph doomed to love in vain (in Switzerland and England) for 105 cineminutes, and to expire of excess happiness and a heart attack inside of one. Charles Boyer is egocentric Composer Dodd, who does not notice that little Tessa is growing up and in love with him. Alexis Smith is his icy socialite wife, who does notice...
...child, Joan Fontaine is a little matronly. But her scenes are memorable in proportion to their painfulness. As death approaches in the Dodds' luxurious London mansion, Cinemactress Fontaine achieves some first-rate emotional acting. So does Charles Boyer. Boyer's chief dramatic assets are commonly believed to be his spaniel eyes and the veins in his temples. The flat fact is that romantic Cinemactor Boyer has forgotten more tricks of acting-or just standing still-than many of his colleagues will ever learn...