Word: camera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Despite its title, Inside U.S.A. gives little sense of satirizing the American scene, or of really exploring the U.S. with Gunther and camera. It is simply a revue which-in the program, at any rate-is attentive to geography. Where associations are virtually unavoidable-as of New Orleans with the Mardi Gras, New Mexico with the Indians, or Chicago with crime-they have not been avoided. Otherwise the actual locale is of little value or even validity: a county fair labeled Wisconsin, for example, smacks a lot more of Oklahoma...
Messrs. Laughton, Camera and Milestone also do the best they can, and once in a while-notably at a White Russian birthday party-the picture comes to some kind of life. But on the whole the show has a kind of pathos that is not the kind intended; the spectacle of a lot of talented people, before and behind the camera, doing their desperate best in an effort which they seem clearly to know is foredoomed...
...like to plug him in the guts." Most of the sequences involved fairly normal business like gun battles, kidnapings, dopings, and Miss Blandish's suicide. But there was one scene (where Miss Blandish's fiance is being kicked to death just out of camera sight) that brought gasps from London audiences...
...theory, eliminated the subplots, preserved only the central study of a falling woman, with a few glimpses of the high society she fell from. This might have been sufficient if the film had also saved a suggestion of the dreadful glacier-creep of Tolstoy's characterization. Instead, the camera work is uniformly uninspired, and the psychological glacier dissolves into teary slush...
Polly's dead-heat companion was Carmen Ogden, and as Gardner and the winning girls posed for sleepy camera men, a benevoleut sun gave the colorful annual classic one of its first pleasant days in many years of hoop rolling...