Word: plot
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...Westerner" is conventional, but so noisily and wholeheartedly as to be outright refreshing. Walter Brennan's superb acting as "The Law West of the Pecos" lends an undercurrent of profundity to all the merry, Western violence. The plot between the shootings is supplied by the Judge's incognito love for Lily Langtree, the actress, and by the romance between a handsome saddlebum (Gray Cooper) and a homesteader's daughter (Doris Davenport, unfortunately). From character play and comedy the picture finally sinks into old fashioned melodrama, and ends up on a note of social significance to remind you that everything...
...Roberts is working, he works all day, sometimes relaxes at a movie while Secretary Mosser types his notes. One movie at which he did not relax: M.G.M.'s Northwest Passage. Says Roberts. "They cut the guts out of it, they gummed up the characters and balled up the plot." He is determined not to sell Wiswell to the movies. "It will be a good insurance policy for Mrs. Roberts," says he, "and it will be just as good ten or 20 years from...
...Wyoming," is a Western, fundamentally like all other Westerns past, present, and future. The film, however, has some distinguishing features. Wallace Beery shambles through the plot with his hand on his holster and the vaguely reproachful mien of a wounded rhinoceros. Even his romance muscle-woman Marjoric Main smacks of mating season in Tanganika. And few actors in Hollywood have sheer primitivism down to such a fine art as Wallace Beery. Another distinguishing feature of the picture is the magnificent landscapes; in fact, the upper part of the screen is far wilder and woolier than the action in the foreground...
...grown into a serious-minded actor of ability; and Norma Shearer, if not your dream girl, makes a very satisfactory countess from E. 57th St. The atmosphere is thick with Nazi ideology: uniforms, clicking heels, and subdued voices. The swastika is very photogenic and provides exciting plot material. Exciting, but perhaps too true to be good...
...delightful comedy it is, "Christmas in July," although not quite worthy of its title. The plot consists of the mad cavorting of a couple in the lower income brackets who think they have won $25,000 until it all turns out to be a joke, and a poor one at that. There is plenty of nuthouse fantasy but enough reality to remind you grimly of Monday morning. Less satisfactory are relapses into pie-throwing burlesque, and the benevolent dei-ex-machina that turn up just in time to make everything come true: the $25,000, the private office...