Word: leer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Fisher's comic strip-or of what the strip was before it got "significance." In really brilliant style it strikes precisely the comic-strip attitude-the understatement of motion, the two-dimensional, parodic life. The villain of the piece (Eduardo Ciannelli) never peeks out from behind his leer; the heroine (Elyse Knox) is rich but unspoiled; the hero (Joe Kirkwood Jr.) is profoundly respectful of his mother, and as innocent as if he had never had a man-to-man talk with his father...
...wretched years of motherhood. She had been forced to sell a $75,000 diamond for $30,000. She was reduced to living in a $175-a-month Manhattan apartment. Last week tradesmen were boldly presuming to offer her jobs-the tabloid New York Daily News announced, with a frightful leer, that Reggie Vanderbilt's 40-year-old widow had been asked to peddle phonograph needles at "$50 a jab." And to make it all practically unendurable, her own daughter, Gloria Vanderbilt Stokowski, with a fortune of $4,500,000, refused to give her a penny. Things hadn...
...only a pedant would rap Bobby Clark for his lively irreverence. As satire, The Would-Be Gentleman is by now both too hackneyed and too broad, and it never was much as a play. Careening through it, or pausing to leer, gag and gurgle his soup, Bobby gives it some high moments of low comedy. But most of the time he is held in chains by the script, or is in a sweat from wriggling out of them...
What they seem to like is what Earl Wilson calls the three Bs-Booze, Busts, Behinds. (Sample Wilson leer: Carole Landis looks "like a chiffonier with its top drawer pulled out." Of another buxom girl, he wrote: "only a build in a girdled cage.") What his readers also get, every so often, is some of the most accurately recorded Broadway-and-Sports Americana since the late great Ring Lardner...
...even five-corpses are going to be too many for one feature-length film. But as soon as the cast is thinned down to working consistency, three expert craftsmen-Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston and Roland Young, as splendid old scoundrels-are given a chance to peer, leer and sneer it up for all they are worth. With Louis Hayward and June Duprez to add youth & beauty, the last five survivors manage to make a mildly interesting stretch run for the finish...