Word: laughton
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...Casablanca, has a similar plot - Paris society belle Joan Crawford is tempted to leave her Resistance-hero husband for American airman John Wayne - but it's miscast, risibly implausible, your basic botch. In The Canterville Ghost (1944), Dassin's job was to referee between two shameless scene-stealers: Charles Laughton and the seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien. If there's a magic moment in any of these features, it might be the climax to Two Smart People (1946), where gunzel Elisha Cook, Jr., falls dead off a balcony during Mardi Gras and lands on a firemen's cloth hoop...
...tribute to a man, go find something he made. In his 89 years, Burgess Meredith directed two films: The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go was not so good; The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) was considerably better, thanks to Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone, and Meredith's own turn as a hapless myopic accused of double murder. Laughton is Inspector Maigret, the portliest policeman since Orson in Touch of Evil, and Tone is Radek, his "Candide"-quoting psychopathic prey. From behind the camera (reportedly with some help from Laughton), Meredith delivers a lean, cerebral mystery with plenty...
...Chaney Jr. or Second Chorus (1940) with Fred Astaire is unsettling; the resemblance is evident, yet it seems somehow not to be him. But that other Burgess Meredith was everything else, from a Shakespearean actor to the quacking Penguin in TV's Batman. He directed himself and Charles Laughton in The Man on the Eiffel Tower, co-produced On Our Merry Way with Henry Fonda and James Stewart, and made three Twilight Zone episodes in 1959. He was married four times, served in the Air Force, and crusaded for environmental causes. And he knew enough...
That film's director, Charles Laughton, thought he was "one of the best actors in the world." Like Huston, Laughton saw beneath Mitchum's surpassing cool the heat of an often disappointed perfectionist. In his signature role, the private eye in the classic film noir Out of the Past, Mitchum grimly accepts doom as the price of sexual obsession and lights his passage to it with flaring wisecracks. "I don't want to die," his inamorata cries. "Neither do I, baby," Mitchum snaps. "But if I have to, I'm gonna die last." As inadvertent epitaphs go, it's pretty...
Following after Lon Chaney, Charles Laughton, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Hopkins and a cartoon isn't easy. Neither is wearing a prosthetic hump for 17 hours a day, but when Turner Network Television offered MANDY PATINKIN The Hunchback (of Notre Dame), he jumped at it. "I don't know how you call yourself an actor if you turn down Quasimodo," says Patinkin. The actor thinks only one of his predecessors really counts. "Laughton, not Victor Hugo, wrote this part," he says. "I'm just playing his notes...