Word: villainously
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...fast moving, swashbuckling action. James Cagney comes through with a thoroughly convincing performance in the title role. Besides looking like a true cowboy, Mr. Cagney shows a depth of character portrayal unusual for pictures of this type. Humphrey Bogart does a fine job as a leering and scheming villain. But Rosemary Lane has been badly miscast. Although she may present a luscious bit of femininity crooning dulcet lyrics in a Dick Powell musical, Miss Lane has not the force necessary to carry this heavy dramatic part. However, the film itself suffers from too much of this serious emotionalism. Its lack...
...Freedom Ring offers a story of the sort which has always been traditional for all Westerns. The stirrings of Hollywood's social consciousness are indicated by the fact that the villain whom the hero (Nelson Eddy) routs is not a cattle rustler nor a bandit but a rapacious railroad owner (Edward Arnold), who is trying to hornswoggle sturdy ranchers out of their land. Thus, while conforming to type, with a full quota of fist fights, shootings, holdups and spectacular conflagrations, Let Freedom Ring reaches its climax when Eddy delivers a rousing speech which convinces railroad workers that they...
...Villain of the piece is a Wall-Streeter named George Wheaton, a graduate of tiny, semipublic, coeducational Clifford Academy. He wants to give Clifford one of his easy millions, on condition that the school become private, preferably for boys only, and that Jews be excluded...
...office, industrial interests, and Mussolini. With such a great amount of vitality drained from the original play, the movie cast has little substance upon which to build their characterizations. Burgess Mcredith's radical Quillery suffers especially from this limitation; Edward Arnold as the munition manufacturer is a bestial villain--which was certainly not Sherwood's intention in writing the play. Even the essential structure of the plot itself has been changed to suit movie audiences;--the pathetic attempt to tack a happy ending on a basically tragic plot detracts greatly from the dramatic force of the play...
...Falstaff o'erstrides the play. Unknightliest of knights, a "tun of a man," a "huge bombard of sack"-guzzler, lecher, liar, braggart, coward, thief-he is like some centrifugal force overcoming gravitation. Far from being a villain, he is the most entertaining and lovable of knaves. Caught out in his outrageous boasts, his fantastic lies, shamming dead (to avoid being killed) on the battlefield, he never loses his unshatterable aplomb, never lags in invention or languishes in wit. At bottom Falstaff may well be a superb showman, not expecting to be believed, only counting on being relished; not expecting...