Word: laughton
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Expectations) and Actor Charles Laughton. The corpse in the case is the British lower middle class, the people Novelist Arnold Bennett found when he lifted the rock of Victorian respectability...
...Laughton plays the part of a widowed tradesman, a better-grade booterer whose three daughters have reached the physical age for marriage. Father, however, has reached the mental age where he cannot let them go, especially when a substantial marriage portion goes with each one. The old terror stalks from his "rightful 'ome comforts" to his "reasonable refreshment" at the pub, bragging in one place about his eminence in the other, while his daughters run the business for him and see their suitors...
What a period comedy generally needs is a strong hand in the cutting shears. Surprisingly, Director Lean has succumbed too often to a temptation to stand there with his shutter hanging open and stare at a prodigious exhibition of facial calisthenics. Laughton smirks, pouts, bug-eyes, belches, quivers his wattles, sleeve-wipes his nose, and generally golliwoggs it to a degree he has not attained since The Private Life of Henry VIII...
...Mark Twain. Davis Grubb, 34, was himself born in Moundsville, W. Va., and named after a grandfather who captained a steamboat on the Ohio. Next for Author Grubb's story: a film version by Producer Paul Gregory (Don Juan in Hell, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial), with Charles Laughton directing...
...always have pertinence: thus, the easy laughs at the expense of the psychiatrist are an integral part of the trial itself, not just a fillip for the show. What is sharp in the play is all the sharper for what is deliberately flat; no one understands better than Director Laughton the counter-theatricalism of the quiet manner...