Word: miscasts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Song from Désirée (Anna Maria Alberghetti; Mercury). Italy's young coloratura is quaveringly miscast as a pop singer in this pseudo-Empire waltz, sounds at home only when vocalizing in the higher reaches...
Director Richard Brooks has played every scene at such a high plateau of emotions that the major ones can hardly be distinguished from the minor. Van Johnson, well-known for his engaging smile, is admirably miscast as a struggling writer. All he can do is screw up his face a little more as each scene reaches new heights of emotional seriousness. By the grand climactic scene, when he goes to his dead wife's sister to plead for the return of his baby girl, the grimace has reached Hallowe'en proportions. "I gotta have 'er back," he pleads, "because...
...players, Van Johnson, as the other American, is a total miscast. Cyd Charisse chores through some tiresome choreography without much zest. And Gene Kelly, an amiable and efficient commercial hoofer, makes another unfortunate attempt to be the poor man's Nijinsky...
Through and around these scenes sweeps Edna Best, wearing a stomacher, a red wig and a putty nose. Though a skilled actress, she is miscast and overplays the vulgarity of her role as she declaims fake-heroic verses, shouts uncomfortably ribald asides, and trails behind her a retinue of hairdressers, manicurists and poets. William Windom and Harry Bannister are effective as youthful and aged incarnations of women-chasers. Superbly costumed by Motley, Colombe is played against Boris Aronson's fine settings-a gauzy, grey-and-golden evocation of the Paris of yesteryear. The language of the Kronenberger adaptation...
Since this movie has been made so often, it is curious that Hollywood cannot at least make it well. The long pearl-fishing flashback puts a potbelly on the middle of the film that never wears off. Actor Granger, admirably suited to British drawing-room movies, is badly miscast. And the derring-duo, Taylor and Actress Blyth, seem, in their big storm scene, while all the screen rocks wildly, as beautiful, as smilingly unperturbed and as lifeless as a manikin couple in a sporting-goods-store window...