Word: laughton
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...Wouk) comes off thoroughly good theater -and not least because it shuns the overtly theatrical. For stage purposes, Novelist Wouk has so backgrounded and built up the court-martial scene of his Caine Mutiny as to suggest a shipboard drama of events through a courtroom drama of character. Charles Laughton has staged the production with a superbly unswerving sense of the whole. Building slowly, the play at length walls in, not the court-martialed Lieut. Maryk, but his accuser, Commander Queeg, skipper of the destroyer-minesweeper U.S.S. Caine...
...Hunchback of Notre Dame would be like kicking a cripple. But a few mild prescriptions might bring the grotesque old man back to the health he deserves. Charles Laughton is superb in the lead role of Quasimodo, but some of the supporting parts, the photography, and the music fall just short of the excellence such a film must have...
...from spoiling the entire film, the mediocre effects offer a forceful contrast to the great moments in this "Hunchback." Laughton is magnificent at the Feast of Fools and in the pathetic tower sequence with Esmeralda. The crowd scenes are uniformly impressive, and the film in all is more than entertaining...
...sort of reefed-in version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Instead of Clark Gable there is Alan Ladd, an actor who, even in the squalor of a windjammer's brig, carries himself as if he were wearing a dinner jacket under his rags. Instead of Charles Laughton there is James Mason, who makes (whenever he raises his voice above its customary elegant whisper) a fetching younger version of Captain Bligh. The wishbone of contention between Ladd and Mason is provided by a chicken named Patricia Medina, who offers, to say the least, some pretty pickings. She is rather peremptorily...
...Charles Brandon, Richard Todd is equally adept at gathering a nosegay for the princess, writing her a sonnet, and fighting off the evil duke and his henchmen. Portly James Robertson Justice plays a younger and more forceful Henry VIII than the one Charles Laughton has made familiar to moviegoers. As Mary Tudor, elfin-faced Glynis Johns, with her wryly insinuating voice, gives a winning characterization of a conniving little royal baggage...