Word: altona
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Sophia Loren, Maximilian Schell and Fredric March in Jean-Paul Sar tre's The Condemned of Altona...
Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of existentialism and Marxism can sense a basic incompatibility between the two dogmas. Jean-Paul Sartre is making a valiant attempt to embrace them both. The Condemned of Altona--written a few years before the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre's futile attempt at reconciliation--reflects the tension that has resulted. To this philosophical mixture is added a complicated plot and allegory on the Algerian War, which was raging when the play was written. (The name of the hero, a former Nazi officer who was the "Butcher of Smolensk" is Frantz, rhymes with France...
...That Flesh-Eating Beast." All jaw and sophistical truth-aches is what ails The Condemned of Altona, at Lincoln Center's Beaumont Theater. Jean-Paul Sartre loves to play moral dentist to his time, and this play is his low-speed drill for making everyone cringe with guilt. An aged German shipping tycoon (George Coulouris) is dying of throat cancer, and he wants to get hand-on-the-Bible oaths of dynastic fealty from his daughter and two sons. Immured in an upstairs room, the elder son, Frantz, has not been seen by his father for 1 3 years...
...Condemned of Altona. Hating Hitlerism is like opposing poison ivy. It is a sensible thing to do, but at this late date it is a difficult thing to do in an original or even interesting way. In The Condemned of Altona, a five-act drama produced four years ago in Paris, Philosopher-Playwright Jean-Paul Sartre almost turned the trick. His play transformed turgid history into skillful theater and tired slogans into existential epigrams. This film, adapted freely from the drama, presents even more impressive credentials. It is directed by Vittorio De Sica. It stars, along with Fredric March...
...fine, but Sartre presses it with French finesse. The film, to put it kindly, is less subtle. Scenarist Mann is a self-righteous and didactic young fellow who seems to feel that he has been personally appointed by Providence to sit in judgment on 80 million Germans. In Altona as in Nuremberg, his script is angry, preachy, shrill. It not only talks down. It is filled with the sort of teacher-knows-best truism ("It is better to face the truth no matter what the cost") that for reply invites a spitball...