Word: styling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
White Heat (Warner) is in the hurtling tabloid tradition of the gangster movies of the '30s, but its matter-of-fact violence is a new, postwar style. Brilliantly directed by Raoul (Roaring Twenties) Walsh, an old master of cinema hoodlumism, it returns a more subtle James Cagney to the kind of thug role that made him famous...
White Heat cuts so deeply into the characters of its big-time hijackers that for once movie gangsters look as humanly criminal as the "wanted" faces on a post office bulletin board. The leading character, a scientific hijacker, is completely abnormal, but Cagney plays him in a stodgy workingman style that makes him as believable as the most ordinary man. Blandly out of contact with reality, the hijacker is seen in a typical shot collecting refuse in the prison workshop, a dumpy figure wearing an expression of near-senile rumination and apparently having the time of his life. His mother...
...pleasant surprise in That Midnight Kiss is Mario Lanza, a young (27) tenor with the spry, nonsensical air of a chipmunk and an Americanized-Caruso voice which gives style and seriousness to the whole production. His least appealing quality, which Metro will apparently exploit for some ten musicals, is the smily, complacent bounce which places him in Hollywood's long list of boys who rouse the maternal instinct...
Standing up, Miss Norden looks like a monument to the dress industry; but her more becoming pose is lying down. England's new matinee idol, Kieron Moore, has an unusual change-of-pace style of acting. He gives the effect of a meandering block of dispossessed concrete that suddenly pauses and sparkles whenever an actress appears on the scene. Saints and Sinners allows the Abbey Players to have a histrionic field day in the Irish countryside...
...Primitive is written in that self-deceiving and deceptive style whose weakness will be mistaken by some for strength. It is clumsy and naive, but devotees of the unspoiled may call it simple and homespun and applaud when Feikema challenges (unsuccessfully) the tyranny of grammar. He has the sort of poetic gift that gets in the way of a good prose, and his recipe for flavoring his concoction is "salt-and-peppering the whole with many a dark adjective and adverb"-not to mention verbs. When Thurs wanted to get from one place to another, he "moosed," "giraffed" or "cameled...