Word: ballard
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...WESTERN BONANZA edited by Jod-hunter Ballard. 419 pages. Doubleday. $6.95. Slick fairy tales from everybody's Old West wholesomely packaged as "frontier folklore...
...other prime virtue of True Grit is the photography of Lucien Ballard. Having, I suppose, nothing better to do than play games, Ballard has created incredible patterns of color and light for every shot in the picture. Were it not for the overriding unbearable quality of Maddy Ross one could well sit back and enjoy pretty pictures for all the two and a half hours that Truse Grit runs...
...LUCIEN Ballard is also on the credits of The Wild Bunch and with the exception of a few props and backdrops it is about all that the two films have in common...
...pretty patterns which Ballard was allowed to establish in True Grit are absent in The Wild Bunch since, unlike the Hathaway film, Sam Peckinpah has directed half to three-quarters of this epic in close-shot. The major exception to this rule of composition comes in the slow-motion orgies of violence which punctuate the film at various crucial points...
...overkill himself. Action sequences-like an attack by the Villa forces on Mapache -occasionally destroy the continuity of the elaborate story, and flashbacks are introduced with surprising clumsiness. These, happily, are not typical moments. More characteristic are the sweeping visual panorama of the whole film (stunningly photographed by Lucien Ballard) and the extraordinarily forceful acting from a troupe of Hollywood professionals. Holden hasn't done such good work since Stalag 17, and the bunch -Ernest Borgnine, Warren Gates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O'Brien, Jaime Sanchez-all look and sound as if they had stepped out of a discarded...