Word: matronly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Busch, the movie tells the story of a headstrong filly (Barbara Stanwyck) with a father fixation. The old man (the late Walter Huston) is a ripsnorting, tyrannical cattle baron who is so absolute a local sovereign that he even prints his own money. When Huston imports a Washington society matron (Judith Anderson) whom he plans to marry, Barbara works herself up to hurling a pair of scissors at the intruder's face. Banished for her impulsiveness, Barbara plots to wreck Huston and seize his domain. She recruits help from another man she hates (because he once scorned her love...
...diffidence of a rabbit stepping into a jungle, she has trouble adjusting to the hysterics, hair-pulling and suicide that are rampant among her fellow inmates. Like other movie prisons, this one is run by a "good" warden (Agnes Moorehead), who is hamstrung by politicians, and a "bad" matron, who eats caramels and reads love stories while her charges suffer. Unable to keep her newborn baby, rebuffed by her mother (brilliantly played as a well-intentioned featherbrain by Phoebe Brand), refused a parole, and finally deprived of a foundling kitten she has adopted, Eleanor changes from a bewildered innocent into...
Phoenix is a blowup of Petronius' famous 1,900-year-old yarn, The Matron of Ephesus. It tells of an inconsolable widow mourning at her husband's bier; and of the soldier who .happens in and consoles her so wondrously that, when someone steals the body he was supposed to guard, she offers her husband's in its place. Petronius tosses the yarn off like a firecracker; Fry draws it out like an accordion, often brightening the proceedings but sadly blunting the effect. Heavy staging blunted it further...
...Dolwyn," but is also co-starred as Lord Lancashire's agent in charge of buying out the landowners of the village. In all three capacities he has performed sensitively and perhaps even poetically for three-quarters of the picture. His conclusion, however, in which an almost saintly village matron releases the floodgates of a dam to inundate her beloved Dolwyn, seems incredibly out of keeping with the rest of the picture. The matron, nevertheless, is almost always a believable and winning person, played with great tenderness by Dame Edith Evans...
...shiny-nosed household drudge, bored and burdened with a husband who doesn't understand her. Escaping rebelliously, she becomes a cynical tart with a burlesque strut. Finally, having double-crossed her way onto the lap of an underworld titan, she acquires all the graces of a society matron. Along the way, Joan proves the undoing of four tall, handsome men, including Kent Smith, an honest but weak accountant, and David Brian, a pseudo-respectable gangland big shot with a taste for Etruscan vases...