Word: laughtons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...also the tragedy of a man's struggle with his own fate. It starts when Jean Valjean (Fredric March), represented as a deserving member of the Paris unemployed, is sentenced to the galleys for ten years for stealing a loaf of bread. There he first encounters Javert (Charles Laughton), the police inspector whose morbid fixation on the letter of the law makes him, as long as he lives, Valjean's Nemesis. When they meet again years later, Valjean is the beneficent mayor of a prosperous provincial town. But that makes no difference to Javert who ferrets...
...with which he was working, surrounds the action of the picture with rich and sulphurous gloom. Fredric March, decorated with such elaborate rags and whiskers that he had to be followed about the lot by a portable dressing room, gives a splendid performance. The strange buttery face of Charles Laughton, a mask of comedy in Ruggles of Red Gap, hardens into unforgettable lines of fixed, neurotic malice in Les Miserables. More than any other single ingredient, it helps to make the picture, like David Copperfield, a superb example of what the current cinema can accomplish with a 19th Century classic...
...unique in U. S. cinema, a quality which can perhaps be suggested by the fact that its climax is reached when the hero, the apotheosis of all fictitious butlers, recites Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the back room of the principal saloon of Red Gap, Washington. Ruggles (Charles Laughton) is sitting at a table with his erratic master, Egbert Froud, and he is facing the crisis of his life. Six months before, he was valet to a British peer who lost him, in a game of draw poker, to the first family...
...best pictures to come to Boston in many a day is being shown this week at the Met. Entitled "Ruggles of Red Gap," it features an all star cast, including Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, Charles Laughton, Roland Young, and Zasu Pitts. The unusual combination of talent makes this picture one of the most entertaining and humorous pictures of the year...
...star is to be singled out for excellence of characterization, that honor goes to Charles Laughton. The others play more or less stereotyped roles, but Laughton's excellent acting adds greatly to his fame as a versatile and capable actor. As the English valet who leaves the service of an English earl, Roland Young, to become the manservant of the American, Charles Ruggles, he is convincing and often amusing. His adventures in America and the slow transition these effect upon his character and personality comprise the plot of the story. For once he is not the villain, but the hero...