Word: joans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Laurence Olivier is surly, taciturn, Byronic Maxim de Winter, the master of Manderley. Surprise of the picture is Joan Fontaine, who plays the second Mrs. de Winter with a shy, overeager, childlike charm suggestive of Selznick's Swedish star, Ingrid Bergman. Judith Anderson is the housekeeper who worshiped the first Mrs. de Winter, hates the second. She stalks about as impassive and implacable as a Cornwall druidess...
...With the Wind followed Margaret Mitchell's. So Director Hitchcock faced the usual problem of filming a wordy book -how to convey long-winded off-stage narrative background without slowing up the fast-moving camera. Out of this handicap Director Hitchcock makes his most exciting scenes. Touching are Joan Fontaine's half-apologetic, half-reluctant reminiscences about her artist father...
Olivier's eight-minute monologue in the abandoned boathouse, as he tells Joan Fontaine about his last night with Rebecca, is the picture's real climax...
...Island and environs instead of in a cheap London lodging-house. Tall, bland, humorous-eyed Ian Hunter is the Christlike central figure. The tangled lives he sets right are not those of petty, shabby, roominghouse misfits, but such splendid votaries of violence as Clark Gable (Convict Verne), Joan Crawford (a fille de joie wearing Miss Crawford's best Oh-God-the-pity-of-it facial), Paul...
Part of its strange power Strange Cargo derives from the tact, restraint and experience of Director Frank Borzage, who made A Farewell to Arms. Part it derives from the fact that all the actors are as perfectly typed as Joan Crawford, who, under one guise or another, has been playing Sadie Thompson so long that the part is almost second nature. Like her, Hollywood has been making Devil's Island pictures so long it has almost perfected the formula. This perfect Hollywood formula is turned into a highly unusual picture by the surprising performance of Ian Hunter...