Word: capra
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...glimpsed in NET'S bright new series The Men Who Made the Movies. Produced, written and directed by Author and TIME Movie Critic Richard Schickel, The Men concludes next week with a profile of King Vidor. The other past masters of American cinema profiled on the series: Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman...
...pompous misreading of history. Howard Hawks' decrying of self-consciousness is contradicted by the rigidities of Red River. For the most part, however, the directors are shown as canny and incorrodable professionals, sustained by vigorous memories and egos. Schickel makes no attempt to hide their flaws: Frank Capra often lurches from sentimentality to unabashed bathos; William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks appear to have been terrors on the set and in their private lives. But whatever their methods, all eight men achieved results that permanently altered the style of world cinema. Those results have never been better analyzed...
Arsenic and Old Lace. Frank Capra directs. Starring Gregory Peck, Peter Lorry and someone who looks like Boris Karloff. About a family of crazies--the aunts kill lonely old men for charity, the convict escapee nephew kills for profit, the son thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt. And they all run around in a chaotic mess of slamming doors and confused criminality. Brattle Theatre...
Signs of the times, and proof that things have changed since Frank Capra visited Novelist James Hilton's Oriental paradise in 1937. Pollution has socked in Burbank, where Producer Ross Hunter (Airport) built the monastery by redecorating a castle set that had been swallowing up space on the Warner Brothers back lot ever since Camelot. One sometimes wonders how the actors get through their Burt Bacharach-Hal David tunes-the contemporary equivalent, presumably, of the music of the spheres-without the aid of bottled oxygen...
Director Jarrott, a specialist in mummified "prestige" pictures like Mary, Queen of Scots, must have taken more than a casual look at Capra's original excursion. The opening of his version matches Capra practically scene for scene-and sometimes shot for shot. The choreography by Hermes Pan contains at least one number-a ballet by a herd of brawny natives swathed in salmon-colored loincloths and swirling matching scarves-that could stand (or leap) as a concise definition of contemporary camp...