Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Like those two films, Man of Aran has only a rudimentary plot and no professional actors. Relying on superb photography, a strapping fishwife named Maggie Dirrane (who acted as Flaherty's housemaid between scenes), a handsome child named Michael and a curly-haired fisherman known as Tiger King, the film shows the daily life of the Aran Islanders, their barren homes where garden soil must be gathered in baskets from crevices in the rock, their frail seagoing curraghs of tarred skins stretched over basketwork frames. High spot in the film is the harpooning of a 30-ft. basking shark...
...matchmaker for younger members of the cast. Presented with dialog patterned after Irvin S. Cobb's quiet Judge Priest stories and permitted but a minimum of head-ducking. Funnyman Rogers is a less hackneyed philosopher than he was in earlier films. Time is the slow Kentucky '90s. Plot is concerned with a judge who is fond of his nephew who is fond of the pretty but poor white trash next door. Not until the courtroom scene discloses that a reticent, no-account town character named Gillis, once convicted of murder, is not only the young girl...
...rest of the U. S. the Pennsylvania Dutch are material for funny-dialect anecdotes, but Author Williamson has skilfully fitted them into his melodramatic formula. In his story, a neat blend of hexerei, psittacosis and the primal appetites, Pennsylvania Dutch dialect throws into ironic relief an increasingly sinister plot. Herman Bauer, good farmer and good husband, coveted his neighbor's land. But if Neighbor Erdman had not come down with parrot fever, which looked like hexerei, if Herman had not found his mother's little hexing book, he might not have gone on to covet Erdman...
...emotional depths build up the play considerably and march carries out his part to perfection, although it seems as though the real Browning was not as blustering as the play would have him. Charles Laughton, as Elizabeth's domineering papa, and, incidentally, the villain of this interesting-because-true plot, succeeds in making one hate him thoroughly because of his superb handling of a part calling for alternate restraint and outbursts of temper...
...about the lady spy whose espionage and counter espionage is complicated by affairs of the heart. "Stamboul Quest," concerning the exploits of Myrna Loy as a German secret service agent, bears too striking resemblance to the well-known story of Mata Hari, and suffers accordingly. Despite the stereotyped plot, the film is capably handled, and proves interesting. Miss Loy, entrusted with the all-important mission of investigating the loyalty of the Turkish commander of the Dardanelles, moves through her role with capable restraint. George Brent is the disturbing factor in Miss Loy's counter-espionage as the self-confident, blustering...