Word: portrait
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Swell Guy (Mark Hellinger; Universal-International) is a full-length portrait of a slob (Sonny Tufts). He is a famed, chaotically incompetent war correspondent who can fool practically everybody in the postwar world except his fellow reporters, his mother and, in rare, lucid moments, himself...
...most of the-supporting performances, are unusually shrewd keyhole glimpses of U.S. provincial life. Sonny Tufts's transformation from a big, pleasant male ingenue to a resourceful actor is as impressive as it is startling. With plenty of assistance from script and direction, Tufts gives a cruelly recognizable portrait of a neurotic extravert: a type all too common in real life and all too rarely seen-through on the screen...
...these days is historical drama, and the motion picture producers aren't forgetting it. Brushing aside any facts that might stand in their way the wily movie magnates have made of Dolly Madison something more than "mine gracious hostess" and daring rescuer of the portrait of George Washington. For, ensconced within the charming structure of Ginger Rogers, she is capable of tap-dancing, being psychoanalized and bewitching young men of good family. She does none of these, however, but there is an omnipresent suspicion that she might, at any moment, go into her routine...
...brought to your portrait of Miss Anderson an understanding and sympathy as rich as her voice...
...considered in his own day-as a somewhat effeminate character. But of his looks just before he died, Thornton Hunt gave this testimony: "The outline of the features and face possesses firmness and hardness entirely inconsistent with a feminine character. . . ." Biographer Blunden finds it regrettable that no portrait of Shelley except the very young and rather girlish one by Amelia Curran has survived. To Blunden, Shelley exemplifies "the supreme capacity called genius...