Word: attenborough
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MAGIC RESEMBLES A bad magician's act -- the skilled hands at work simply lack the ability to generate suspense or even to entertain. Part of the blame for this less-than-thrilling thriller lies with the ponderous pace of Richard Attenborough's direction, the same touch that made his A Bridge Too Far an hour too long. Nor is there much life in William Goldman's script, which uncomfortably straddles the genres of mystery and psycho-drama. The familiar theme of the mad ventriloquist and his not-so-dumb dummy can still invoke shudders, but the filmakers' failure to find...
...Attenborough and Goldman miss a good bet by failing to suggest that Fats is really alive somehow. We never doubt that it is Corky expressing his subconscious desires through the dummy when Fats speaks. Stripped of its suspense in this way, Magic becomes a superficial portrait of a schizophrenic...
...this William Goldman's script lays out with admirable clarity and for something like half the film's running time. When events begin to overwhelm dramatic logic, Director Attenborough loses his design in the smoke and din of a huge, confused battle. Then, too, there is an attempt to humanize the conflict by recounting sundry vignettes of what life was like for troops serving below staff level. By the time James Caan has got his wounded captain to hospital and Elliott Gould has thrown a temporary bridge across a stream in record time and Robert Redford...
...eager distributors to cover his $25 million outlay for A Bridge Too Far. The saga of the abortive Allied attempt to cross the Rhine in 1944 by parachuting 35,000 men behind the lines into Holland, the movie employed an army all by itself. Besides the stars, Director Richard Attenborough recruited 100 young actors in London and trained them to behave and, supposedly, even think, like crack British troops. For the dramatic scenes of the airborne assault, hundreds of paratroopers from a Belgian unit and from Britain's 16th Paratroop Brigade jumped out of antique DC-3 Dakotas...
...subscribers. "The state of today's culture is so low that I do not care to spend my time watching and discussing it. I am haunted by a quotation from Nietzsche: 'It is not my function to be a flyswatter.' " -British Actor-Director Richard Attenborough was "thrilled beyond measure" when he received from No. 10 Downing Street a letter offering him a trusteeship in London's prestigious Tate Gallery. So thrilled, he later remembered, that he neglected to open a second letter from the same address. It contained a polite inquiry as to whether Attenborough would...