Word: screens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...radio, Norman Corwin's "My Client Curley" was a delightful trip into whimsy that was well-nigh a perfect blend of lilting humor and that indefinable thing called heart. On the screen, "Once Upon A Time" is an agreeable dose of fantasy that has lost the deft Corwin touch in the hands of Hollywood scriptwriters and turns out good when it should have been tops...
Fleet, flexible second-grade melodrama, handled with habitual British know-how, Candlelight is further enjoyable for its three leading performances. Canadian Carla Lehmann, with her prairie voice, is about twice as American as the average U.S. screen heroine. James Mason, an English matinee idol new to U.S. cinemaddicts, suggests a welterweight Clark Gable. Walter Rilla, once popular on the German stage and screen, is perhaps the most satisfying portrayer of suave continental menace since the late Conrad Veidt...
...This screen reincarnation of Curley's story is not the best picture of 1944, but it is bland and sometimes amusing fantasy...
Stinky, on the screen, becomes Pinky (Ted Donaldson), a plump little boy who, for all his talents, looks too much like a child actor. Curley does all his workouts in a shoe box, and though dozens of his screen colleagues watch him constantly, the tantalized audience never gets a gander. The agent (Cary Grant) is no pathetic shoe-stringer. He is a dapper Broadway impresario in danger of losing his theater. When he loses it, Cary is solaced by meeting Pinky's lush sister (Janet Blair). His slit-pussed sidekick (James Gleason), is perhaps the best member...
Much of the radio play's rapid improvisation and kidding is lost on the screen, but enough is left to carry the story. The fable itself, as scripted by Lewis Meltzer and Oscar Saul, is given new gentleness, meaning, sadness-the journalists are tougher, the scientists more cruel and smug. The use of Art Baker to play bleating Gabriel Heatter is a master stroke. But Alexander Hall's direction, less nimble than in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, fails to make these ingredients do more than crawl about. Almost never do they get up on their good points...