Word: svengali
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Genius (Warner) differs from Svengali in the fact that John Barrymore's protégé is this time a dancer instead of a singer and a young man instead of a young woman. Barrymore also uses a slightly different make-up-a thin mustache, straggling goatee and a clamp on his left leg, to make him clubfooted. Unable to be a dancer himself, he becomes an impresario hypnotized by ambition to make an expert dancer out of someone else. Presently he finds a suitable subject -a young man with a Slav countenance and an impetuous disposition (Donald Cook...
Metropolitan--"Svengali", famous drama of music and hypnotism starring John Barrymore in the lead and Marian Marsh as Trilby...
...Svengali (Warner). This is a vigorous example of John Barrymore's second or hokum manner. In contrast to his first or popular manner, in which the spectator's attention is directed to the beauty of his profile and his legs, the second manner (Moby Dick, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) involves the creation of sinister atmosphere by means of makeup, pale rolling eyes, false whiskers, mouth pieces used for the distortion of the teeth, and stilts in his shoes to make him look taller. He is Svengali, the musical hypnotist of the Latin quarter, in a story that...
...Fiske's rapid, casual delivery's, as ever, expert and sometimes unintelligible. Of the tricks of emphasis and accent she is still past-mistress. In this disappointing play she is accompanied by another oldtimer, Wilton Lackaye, who made mesmerist Svengali famous (Trilby, 1895), who returns, after a three-year illness, to do an excellent bit as the exasperated Judge...
...that Cheviot Hill, so excellently done by J. M. Kerrigan, a gentleman of property who is dangerously susceptible to femininity, finds himself beset with a small stage full of weeping and demonstrative ladies to whom he has quite innocently made love on other days, beset also by the Svengali-eyed villain, Belvawney and by Minnie's papa. Gilbert's fooling here is perfectly, magnificently silly, and what is gayer than untrammeled silliness...