Carole Lombard.

"Mobilizing a heart-shaped face that might have been carved from alabaster were it not quite so elastic, oversized eyes that flicked from wide-open innocence to heavy-lidded allure, and a voice that, though velvety on command, more often gushed forth in a high, tinkling rush, Carole Lombard seemed to play with the properties of celluloid as if they were finger paints." In the Voice, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert previews the Film Forum series running from Friday through December 2.

"An earthly deity of the silver screen, she was more than just blonde and beautiful - she also possessed a quick wit and daffy lunacy that remains unsurpassed over 70 years later," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.

Updated through 11/22.

"Lombard's career took a very long time to hit its stride, but soared to the heavens once it did," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Earlier: Steve Vineberg in the Boston Phoenix.

Update, 11/20: "In at least seven movies, all of them comedies with serious undertones, the exuberant Carole Lombard became emblematic of the whole screwball comedy genre of the 30s, and she passed into folklore with her marriage to Clark Gable and her early death in a plane crash in 1942, at age 34." A terrific appreciation from Dan Callahan at the House Next Door.

Update, 11/21: "'Marvelous girl - crazy as a bedbug' was the great director Howard Hawks's considered assessment of Carole Lombard, the young leading lady of his raucous 1934 farce, Twentieth Century, which made her a star," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "Hawks was no mean connoisseur of female marvelousness - he later performed similar star-making services for Lauren Bacall, in To Have and Have Not, and Marilyn Monroe, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - and 1934 was a very good year to be a crazy girl on screen. During the Depression everybody was at least a little deranged, and movie audiences liked to take their doses of comedy in the form of giddy, helter-skelter romantic farce, the style known, then and now, as screwball. Carole Lombard, blond, beautiful and fearless, was the pre-eminent screwball of her mad, desperate time."

Update, 11/22: Bruce Bennett for Stop Smiling:

The accepted orthodoxy in American film history is that the advent of the talkies and the cumbersome soundproofing and microphones that came with it sent the late period silent film's sophisticated visual storytelling back to the film grammar stone age. It was, we're told, principally the efforts of visionary camera stylists like Alfred Hitchcock and dialogue masters like Howard Hawks that toppled the tyranny of sound film's technical encumbrances. The Hawks and Hitchcock entries in the series, the justifiably revered Twentieth Century, and the curiously overlooked Mr and Mrs Smith respectively are both breezily modern, immensely entertaining comedies showcasing their directors' gifts for gracefully break neck comic escalation in Hawks' case and sharply defined narrative point of view in the Hitchcock film.

But film history always appears willing to leave the actor out of the equation when adding up how movies endured the transitional years from silence to sound. Innovation and evolution in cinema storytelling was and still is shepherded on the backs of performers.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2008 8:35 AM