Word: underplay
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...casual saunter with which the British team goes out to greet the returning climbers and to hear the fate of its expedition will go down in anecdote as a classic underplay in the British tradition. When Lowe, the first of the three to come down, gives the sign for thumbs up, a thrill shoots through the audience; and when the camera picks up Hillary and Tenzing, their faces shining like those of men who have been in paradise, it is a hard heart that will not beat faster, and a hard face that will not break into answering smiles...
...story revolves around the life and loves of Henri Toulouse Lautrec, painter of Paris seamier side. With his legs pinioned beneath him, Jose Ferrer portrays the dwarfed, crippled Lautrec. Very few across can underplay a role and be convincing , but Ferrer does just that in Moulin Rouge. Ignoring the highly emotional aspects of his character, he gives great realism to Toulouse Lautrec's pathetic figure...
Movies produced or directed by Clarence Brown (Flesh and the Devil, National Velvet") are not likely to be commonplace. Intruder is an honest attempt to picture the South as it actually is, but Brown's efforts to underplay the sensational and the macabre material lead to an impression of stiffness. The menacing events are pictured with such a reaching for poetic blandness that, by contrast, an energetic shot of the sheriff whipping up some scrambled eggs becomes a hardhitting, action-filled image...
...high time, perhaps, that readers and reviewers take a positive attitude towards the Advocate. The tendency in the past has been to emphasize its rather obvious deficiencies and to overlook or underplay the genuine talent which now and then appears on its pages...
...card-playing Papa Gershwin, Morris Carnovsky blends humility, humor and awesome respect for his gifted son. ("How nice you write it out, Georgie, such black ink," he says, examining in uncomprehending wonder George's first musical manuscript.) Herbert Rudley and Albert Basserman underplay with moving simplicity the difficult roles of a retiring, satellite brother and a music teacher distrustful of Mammon's claims on his favorite pupil. Oscar Levant, as himself, needs no acting skill to project his practiced cockiness, but respect for his late friend in real life has given his comic relief performance an unexpected depth...