Ask Mick LaSalle: Is Daniel Craig too thuggish for Bond?

Craig’s eyes are steely, and when he wears a tux, he looks like a bulldog with a chain around its neck.

Craig’s blue-eyed stare is one of the coldest in the world, second only to Vladimir Putin’s, and he does look like a bulldog in a tuxedo, but to me that harks back to Sean Connery.

Dear Mick: I’m curious what you think about the internal dialogue in “Strange Interlude” (1932).

Are there other films that have used the same way of expressing how characters really feel?

The movie is based on a Eugene O’Neill play, in which the characters, in between speaking to each other, say their thoughts out loud to the audience, so that all the subtext is spoken.

Before the film version was made, someone realized that that kind of thing could never work onscreen.

Clearly, the only smart alternative was to just adapt the script without those spoken thoughts, but no.

[...] they got the zany idea to have the actors speak their dialogue and then pause as a recording of their thoughts is played out loud.

(In the 1932 film “Me and My Gal,” Spencer Tracy tells Joan Bennett that he just got back from a nutty picture called “Strange Innertube,” and for the next few exchanges we hear their thoughts.) Yet, strangely enough, “Strange Interlude” isn’t bad — especially the first hour.

If you connect with the character of the little guy, and contemplate what it would be like to live your whole life in a space 10 feet square, with a completely distorted conception of the world, then you’ll probably love the movie.

[...] if your point of identification is the mother, and you can’t stop thinking about how horrible it would be to be trapped in a 10-foot-square room with a kid who’s screeching and carrying on, then you’ll not only want them to escape that room.