Word: laughtons
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...only comes around to cadge money and food. When his 16-year-old niece Celia goes to pose for him, she meets a double man who divides and finally conquers her loyalties. On one of his Olympian binges, or gnawing a chicken wing, he seems like another Charles Laughton playing Henry VIII. But behind the regal belch hides the lonely and fiercely honest old artist. He mercilessly paints Celia in a cage, an adolescent waif trapped behind the narrow bars of parental thou-shalt-nots. At novel's end, with Fatuncle's help, she has flown the coop...
Charlie Ruggles starts the evening with a dead-pan destruction of crockery second in violence only to Field's motorized antics, but aside from this, slapstick is kept to a minimum. George Raft as a counterfeiter and Charles Laughton as a downtrodden clerk provide small gems so the whole, and only Gary Cooper and Jack Oakie fail to maintain the pace set by the older comics...
...Captain Cook found some geographical points, but he missed the emotional one that Sadie Thompson and Ginger Ted, the supreme remittance man in all literature, have supplied to millions. Ted is back again in this second screen version of The Beachcomber. This time Actor Robert Newton sees, as Charles Laughton in the 1939 version failed to, the low, colonial swank of the fellow, and plays it for the snickers it deserves...
...neither better nor worse than he has been in all his films that I have seen. In fact, his playing is most always the same from picture to picture, Sim being a sort of one man acting convention in the manner of such set characters as Charles Laughton and Robert Newton. He is always superb, cast always in roles that are suited to his acting style...
Again, as in the early British comedies, the assortment of supporting actor with outlandish faces, and acting styles to match, is another point of magnificence. Not that the principals are less than they should be. Charles Laughton as naturally a blustering curmudgeon, is almost more than he should be, his normal portrayal of Charles Laughton not being entirely faithful to the spirit of the picture. But even Laughton is comparatively restrained, and his co-stars, Bernda deBanzie and John Mills, are positively sparse in their underplaying. For Hobson's choice, whose comedy is of the delicate, throw-away nature, this...