Word: villainizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last three years have they been able to make what they like for themselves. In the silent days, audiences crowded into tent theatres, sat ankle-deep in dust watching the leaps of Douglas Fairbanks, the tears of Barbara La Marr. They took it all very seriously, bombarding the villain on the screen with fruit and dirt. Occasionally an old. leathery Villista Dorado (Pancho Villa bodyguard) would come down from the mountains for a show, angrily pepper the screen with his six-shooter to save the heroine from the buzz saw. But the arrival of sound was tough on Mexicans...
Despite the fact that Jawn rhymes with corn and that Mr. William Gillette is not the greatest pen-pusher of the last age, "Too Much Johnson" is liable to start you on a laughing jag. Just get in the spirit of the thing. It's blessed with a villain who commands his plantation slaves by shooting a gun over their heads, a blushing damsel, a Frenchman with mustachios and a hero who extricates himself from spots tighter than his 1890 pants. The farce is flavored with one ridiculous situation after another, though it must be admitted that...
Ellis Robinson as Augustus Billings (who spends the whole night trying to get out of a scrape with a little French girl) gets in a neat piece of acting. Others like the villain Johnson, played by Richard Wiechmann, mother-in-law Charlotte Armstrong or demure Claire Johnston have little chance at anything but a blush or a shrick. But they and the whole cast, in fact, can do this...
...moralists were licked, the novel triumphant. Then it became transfigured with Uplift-Mesmerism, Mormonism, Bloomerism, above all, Teetotalism and Abolitionism. As villain, the boozer rivaled the seducer, now plying his wenches with animal magnetism and transcendentalism, instead of sighs and potions. Among temperance novelists was Walt Whitman, who confided that he wrote the "rot" with the help of several bottles of port. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was promptly answered by at least 14 pro-slavery novels, including Aunt Phillis's Cabin. Deep in their weeping willows and haunted groves, early U. S. novelists...
...might all have gone down in a sea of verbiage without the mood of pursuing doom running from scene to scene. For this, the bows may well go to Cameraman Tony Gaudio, whose slanting shadows and subdued photography make the tropic atmosphere more ominous than the leer of any villain...