Word: chaney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forces him to tap depths of which few suspected him even capable. Here, sorely afflicted and afflicted with sores, he stays hunched over on his knees for half an hour. And here he touches greatness; to find a just comparison, one must go all the way back to Lon Chaney Sr.'s title-role performance in the 1922 film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame...
...late Merrill Moore reading a number of his poems about death, Seamus O'Neill, an Irish poet, read three of his poems that had been translated from the Gaelic, noting, "it puzzles me that people who have no knowledge of Irish history are still interested in it." Mr. Chaney then called the Fugitive movement "the greatest philosophical meetings" of his life...
...Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris; Allied Artists) offers a Quasimodo (Anthony Quinn) who is as ugly as an iguana, but as lovable as a kitten and no more frightening. In two earlier filmings of Victor Hugo's romance, Lon Chaney (1923) and Charles Laughton (1939) took care to spook the audience out of its wits before building up sympathy for the. lovesick, crookbacked bell ringer. But the current Technicolor version (with a French supporting cast, dubbed-in English) introduces Notre Dame's resident troll tenderly stroking a pigeon on one of the cathedral's balustrades...
James Cagney plays the role with sensitivity and understanding. As Chaney's two wives. Dorothy Malone and Jane Greer, though plotted in severe black and white, manage to make grey-toned human beings of themselves. Most important, Lon Chaney is presented in all his frail- ties. He was a jealous, generous, obstinate, softhearted man. Seldom in Hollywood's euphemistic tributes to its own has the tribute included so many ugly realities at the expense of glamorous garnish...
...always thrilling, according to most movie biography scripts, to die at the very height of one's career. Chaney did just that in 1930, after spreading his versatile voice all over his only sound movie, a talking version of The Unholy Three, in which he played both a ven- triloquist and a fiendish old lady. There was a popular gag going around at that time about insects: "Don't step on it; it may be Lon Chaney in disguise!" Chaney regarded the quip as a true com- pliment...