Word: playe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...play chronicles the brilliant, unprincipled career of an Englishman who will stoop to any low trick out of love for his son. The theme...
Edward never appears in the play, which is probably wise as well as ingenious, for the play really scores as the whopping success story of a ruthless charmer who begins as a small shopkeeper faced with bankruptcy and winds up a potentate and peer of the realm. With bright humor and a sort of icy gaiety, Holt gambles, soft-soaps, bludgeons, picklocks his way out of scrapes and up the ladder. And the play's interest really lies much less in whom he does it for than in how he does it; the Edward role seems...
...play does not lack insight, but its real allegiance is to the footlights, with their richer-than-life diet of emotions. As Holt, indeed, Actor Morley sinks his teeth into the role as though it were an ear of corn dripping with butter-which, theatrically, it is. As Holt's wife, Actress Ash-croft-turning from a happy young mother into a blotchy old drunk-has a fat acting part too; but for brief seconds here & there, she is so good that she gives it the pinched look of tragedy...
...River is not only a fulfillment for Director Hawks, it is a high promise for Actor Montgomery Clift, who plays the thorny young man with a fresh blend of toughness and charm. This is Cliffs first picture, though his second, The Search (TIME, March 29), was released ahead of it. No one "discovered" Monty Clift jerking sodas or selling shoes. Twenty-eight years old this month, he has spent half his life in the theater ( The Skin of Our Teeth, The Searching Wind, There Shall Be No Night). He is that rare bird with both screen personality and acting talent...
...Largo. A veteran recovers his self-respect fighting gangsters. Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor et al. do fine work in John Huston's adaptation of a Maxwell Anderson play (TIME...