Word: laughtons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Eighth," this week's full course at the University, has chosen to concentrate its attention on Henry as a husband; it possesses none of the political flavour of Mr. Arliss' Disraeli. There are, of course, occasional parentheses on foreign policy, but they are pretty half-hearted parentheses, and Mr. Laughton feels with the audience that he had better get on to his business. Each of the six queens is dutifully trotted out, and as some of them were in real life fascinating and unfascinating and some unfascinating, so are they in the picture. But there is neither ebb nor flow...
...fact that fat, squashy Charles Laughton looks almost exactly like Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII is really a very trivial aid to this picture. Laughton gives all his impersonations a preternatural vitality and if he had happened to look otherwise, it would merely have seemed that Holbein had been inaccurate. The whole picture, directed by Alexander Korda, reflects the validity of his acting: it is a shiny, caustic, understanding portrait of a personage as comprehensible as he is extraordinary. Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Charles Laughton) does, next to her husband, the cleverest acting in the picture. Binnie Barnes...
...compelling attention without being in the least convincing. After seeing the picture audiences should be better able to credit the most recent additions to the Hollywood saga about DeMille. Back from a preview of The Sign of the Cross, in which the thing the crowd liked best was Charles Laughton's brilliant high comedy performance as Nero, Director DeMille whispered sadly to a confrere: "I have something terrible to tell poor Charlie. The audience laughed...
...intensity of action and elaborateness. Fredric March, as Marcus Superbus, prefect of Rome, who goes to death in the arena because of his love for Mercia (Elissa Landi), one of the persecuted Christians, and Claudette Colbert, who plays Nero's wife, Poppaea, do very well, but Charles Laughton, as the fat, indolent Nero, gives the picture its life blood. See him reclining after a heavy night of delicious debauchery while he puffs for breath as slaves manicure him, listen to him say "go away now," watch his eyes as he wildly strums the lyre as Rome burns and you will...
Paramount--"Sign of the Cross." Cecil B. de Mille's extravaganza of the lavish days of the Imperial Purple, with a sterling cast headed by Charles Laughton...