Word: laughton
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...Devil's name is Charles Laughton, and he speaks of Heaven and Hell in the 50-year-old words of George Bernard Shaw. Next week, as Laughton brings Shaw's Don Juan in Hell on its third trip into Manhattan for an eight-week run, he enjoys the satanic satisfaction of a man who has confounded the experts, given a new theatrical trend a tremendous boost, and turned the old pastime of reading aloud into a booming big business...
...touring Don Juan has already piled up gross profits of more than $1,000,000. When it was interrupted three months ago to let the cast do some movie acting, Charles Laughton went off on a solo tour, to give readings from the Bible, Aesop and Dickens. Six weeks later he pocketed $90,000 of the $164,000 gross. Laughton says complacently: "Contrary to what I'd been told in the entertainment industry, people everywhere have a common shy hunger for literature...
Shining Sticks. With Don Juan in Hell, Laughton is tossing a sizable bone to the culture-starved. Don Juan, the seldom-played third act of Shaw's Man and Superman, is a dream sequence that is short on dramatic action and two hours long on Shavian talk about sex, marriage, war & peace, science, religion, literature, politics and man's fate. Before it was tried by Laughton and the other talented members of the cast (Charles Boyer, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Agnes Moorehead), Don Juan had never had a major U.S. production. "The longest theatrical aside in the history...
...Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead, as the First Drama Quartette, have let the country hear some much-neglected dialectical fireworks-the hell scene...
...adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel--Thomas Mitchell is excellent as the Beggar King of backstreet Paris, even Maureen O'Hara is adequate as a gypsy dancer who violates some sort of 16th century McCarran Act and gets the Dungeon in return. For my money, though, it's Laughton all the way. His sardonic leer and characteristic aplomb steal the show whether he is abducting a woman, riding gleefully on the swinging church bells, or swooping down from the sky to save Miss O'Hara from the hangman's noose. Toward the picture's end, as a mob of Parisian...