Word: svengalis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Svengali (M-G-M). Faced with making a 1955 movie out of Trilby, George du Maurier's period novel of 1894, Director Noel Langley decided to play the story straight. As a result, moviegoers get a full treatment of the giant-sized nobilities and epic despairs that swirl up from Victorian drama, reflected in the iridescent mirror of fin de siecle Paris...
Essentially, the film chronicles the triumph of British pluck over Levantine cunning. On one side are ranked wholesome Terence Morgan and his fellow painters (Derek Bond and Paul Rogers); on the other looms the hypnotic Svengali (oldtime Shakespearean Actor Donald Wolfit). who drifts about the screen in tattered clothes, rather like a grounded crow. In between is Hildegarde Neff, who makes Trilby, the Irish artist's model, exactly the "great, beautiful, stupid cow" of a woman that Du Maurier intended...
Spectacular (Sat. 9 p.m., NBC). Svengali and the Blonde, a 90-minute musical version of George du Maurier's Trilby, starring Carol Channing, Basil Rathbone. Narrator: Ethel Barrymore...
...offering four summer Spectaculars. One, a nostalgic reminiscence of a prewar year, Remember-1938, was shown last week with Groucho Marx as host. Two of the three others promise to be good summer fare: the Broadway musi-comedy One Touch of Venus, and Svengali and the Blonde, a musical version of Trilby, starring Carol Channing...
...Snyder in a West Side slum, and the closest he had come to the military life was in the Chicago gang wars. Known familiarly as "The Gimp" because of a pronounced limp attributed to 17 shotgun slugs in his leg, Snyder soon proved his ability as a show-business Svengali. He married Ruth and managed her from dingy nightspots to nationwide popularity. But the incessant obbligato to her torch songs was Snyder's fearsome behind-the-scenes frenzies. Mostly, his uncontrolled temper was directed at Ruth's employers, and the combination of her talent and his tan trums...