Word: laughtons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Providing parts for all hands requires 137 years' worth of story-or very nearly forever and a day. The story concerns a fabled house in London, from its building by a British admiral in 1804 until its destruction by a Nazi bomb. Among its starry occupants are Charles Laughton (a tipsy butler), Sir Cedric Hardwicke (a plumber), Claude Rains (a rich villain), Roland Young (a boarder), Merle Oberon (a desk clerk), Anna Neagle (a grownup foundling). Good scene: Brian Aherne (a coal heaver) making love to Ida Lupino (a scullery maid...
...three stars (Charles Laughton, Brian Donlevy, Robert Taylor) who attempt to impersonate naval officers in the picture, Mr. Laughton, as an irascible old rear admiral, is the loudest and funniest. His climactic line comes when he is handed a signaled message from the destroyer just after the battle. He pauses before reading it to declaim to his fellow officers on the bridge of his flagship: "This message . . . will probably be as famous in the American Navy as Perry's 'We have met the enemy and they are ours.' . . ." The message...
...chocolate soda, a sandwich, occasional sips of water, vast, durable Kate Smith topped the shattering, 17-hour war-bond-selling grind of moderately vast Charles Laughton (TIME, Oct. 12) by three hours and $1,675,550. She sat down at a mike at Manhattan's WABC at 6 a.m., one minute later answered the first phone call from a bond-buyer, answered calls for the next 20 hours at the rate of two a minute. At 6 p.m. she complained of a sore neck, asked somebody to hit her. No one did. At 2 the following morning...
...Hecht story concerns a tail-coat, bought from the tailor by Charles Boyer, and passing in turn to Henry Fonda, Cesar Romero, Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson, and Paul Robeson, ending up ingloriously on a scarecrow in a poor negro's corn patch. The coat brings happiness to some and serves as a jinx to others, but it travels merrily on its way, oblivious of all the trouble it is causing. The film is divided into five sequences, the first is marvelous, but by the end of the two hours, the audience is more than ready to say farewell...
...film is, in the strictly legal sense, original. Ben Hecht ducoed the Molnar play into the triangle. Donald Ogden Stewart and Alan Campbell whipped up the first act of Ladislaus Fodor's play Burberry into the brief burlesque. Two other Ladislauses, Vadnai and Gorog, worked up the Charles Laughton tearjerker. Samuel Hoffenstein and Henry Blankfort are responsible for the sharecropper scene...