Word: leers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After years of playing fabulous amateur detective roles with blossoming starlets clinging to his manly arms, George Sanders finally gets top billing in something better than a grade C picture. But even the sophisticated sneer and the amorous leer that made "The Saint" famous, working overtime, can't haul "The Moon and Sixpence" out of the morass of mediocrity...
This ghastly leer in the direction of South America is only the first of a series about the U.S. which Dr. Goebbels projects. In one way Hollywood has unintentionally prepared the ground for him. Thanks to Hollywood, most of the world already has such a completely unrealistic idea of the U.S. that many a European moviegoer may not find the antics of Gone With the Wind so ridiculous as they would appear to U.S. eyes...
...hammiest scenes and lines have been left intact, and are played straight. The barkeeper and the gambler leer, sneer, entrap their victims. Joe the drunkard wrestles in agony with the demon rum; his little daughter quavers Father, Dear Father, Come Home With Me Now, and later dies; Joe remorsefully swears off liquor with the old gag, "I'll never drop another drink-I mean drink another drop." The gambler stabs the squire's son, and the barkeeper's son slugs his old man to death with a gin bottle...
...smart uniform to chorine Betty Grable. She can't choose between plain love from Tyrone and love with a ring from his commander. Miss Grable's acting still isn't as much above par as her legs, but she is improving rapidly. Power has added a wicked leer to his own somewhat dramatic achievements...
...took Kittredge's course in Chaucer; he expressed his indignation at Skeat's edition (which we had to use) because it was expurgated with . . . . etc. Whenever we came to these passages, Kittredge patiently read the words that were not there, never with a leer or a snigger, of course, but like a man talking to men. I won't tell you a line that Skeat left in, though I know it, but at this line Kittredge, with ineffable contempt said "This is the most obscene line in Chancer and Sheat left...