Word: backstreets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...since the late Marie Dressier delicately tucked a pint of hooch in her grandmotherly bosom. One moment Actress Magnani comes lurching on-camera as shapeless as a burlap bag full of cantaloupes; the next she is sleazing through the dusk in black lace with the toothsome glitter of a backstreet-walker in Naples. And she battles her way into a girdle of yesteryear with all the fury and desperation of the Royal Welch Fusiliers at Bunker Hill, somehow imparting to her defeat some of the sorrowful majesty of a historical debacle...
...course, there are other actors in this ten-year-old adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel--Thomas Mitchell is excellent as the Beggar King of backstreet Paris, even Maureen O'Hara is adequate as a gypsy dancer who violates some sort of 16th century McCarran Act and gets the Dungeon in return. For my money, though, it's Laughton all the way. His sardonic leer and characteristic aplomb steal the show whether he is abducting a woman, riding gleefully on the swinging church bells, or swooping down from the sky to save Miss O'Hara from the hangman's noose...