Word: lardners
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...come from the whimsical, confused Milland as he changes professions and from Paul Douglas, who plays Ray's catcher and room mate. Douglas, matching his stage performance in "Born Yesterday" and his other movie appearance in "A Letter to Three Wives," is the tobacco-chewing, hardheaded, soft-hearted, Ring Lardner ball player who wisecracks at the umpire during business hours and spends the rest of the day keeping his irascible pitcher in tow. One of the picture's funniest scenes comes when he uses some of the magic lotion for hair tonic and finds that he can't smooth...
Died. Neysa McMein Baragwanath, sixtyish, magazine-cover illustrator (Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, McCall's) and portrait artist whose Manhattan studio was once a famed meeting place for artists and writers (Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, the late Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley and Alexander Woollcott); following an operation; in Manhattan...
...producers have shifted the emphasis of Ring Lardner's famous short story so that it is not Midge Kelly, but the "boxing game," that comes out the villain. In the original, Kelly knocks down his crippled brother and his mother, and throws a fight in the first two pages. None of this lovable character delineation appears in the movie; instead Midge becomes a man who just can't lose--an animal who refuses to fall down, either by agreement or because of terrific punishment. He wins his last fight after being beaten silly because he gets sore in the fifteenth...
...actual fighting scenes are better than anything in recent films. Douglas must have spent a long time learning to hit people and be hit, for he is never, as was Lardner's Midge, "stopped by a terrific slap on the forearm." The women in the movie are less convincing--the spectator is never more moved by them than is the hero, who shuttles from one to the next with singular unconcern. They aren't very important, anyway: once Kelly begins fighting, he is always a fighter and only sporadically a human being...
...Champion" loses the acid of Lardner's prose, although length is probably as much at fault as anything. It also indulges in a handful of coincidences and cliches that weaken an otherwise tight structure. Perhaps the most difficult problem facing a critic of this movie is its basic black-and-white. journalistic character: you can't get involved because the hero doesn't draw sympathy. Director Mark Robson has shaded the film impersonally and perfectly. It is a tribute to his direction that the one strong emotion the audience feels is the desire to haul Midge Kelly...