Word: capra
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Riding High (Paramount). When famous novelists or playwrights begin to find their ideas flagging, they are usually reduced to mooning wistfully over their early triumphs. But a famous moviemaker in the same plight can simply dig out an old success and do it all over again. Producer-Director Frank Capra has done just that in this remake of his 1934 hit, Broadway Bill. With basically the same Robert Riskin script, at least seven character actors playing their original roles and Capra repeating his crafty directorial touches, the new movie is as beautifully turned a piece of hokum...
What spoils this film is stilted direction and lack of continuity. The incidents appear choppy, and the final one--in an old ladies' home--is almost mawkish in its sentimentality. The picture needs a director like Frank Capra: someone who can be heartwarming and hypersentimental and get away with...
Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur make two appearances during the period--once tomorrow in "You Can't Take It With You" and again Saturday in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." These two Frank Capra comedies are probably the week's most enjoyable offerings. With them go "The Invaders"--Raymond Massey, Lawrence Olivier, and Leslie Howard dealing with a German submarine invasion--and "Welcome Stranger," termed "a warm and human tale" by the management, which probably found the money brought in by Crosby, Caulfield, and Barry Fitzgerald the most warm and human element in the whole thing...
Clift recently finished his third picture, William Wyler's The Heiress. Now he is committed to Liberty Films, a Paramount subsidiary, for three more (which must be directed by Wyler, Frank Capra or George Stevens). Meanwhile, he is free to accept offers from Broadway, where he is also in great demand. One offer is for Lillian Hellman's forthcoming dramatization of the best-selling The Naked and the Dead. Clift doesn't know whether he'll do it : he hasn't seen the script...
...Capra made a few passes and presto! 1) much of Lindsay & Grouse's dialogue disappeared, and the cutting edge was flaked off; 2) the gadfly-buzz of the play's action slowed to a snore. To sustain the illusion of interest, Wonder-Worker Capra relied on a blaze of star-power: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Van Johnson, Adolphe Menjou, Angela Lansbury. But Tracy, as in all his recent pictures, lacks fire; Hepburn's affectation of talking like a woman trying simultaneously to steady a loose dental brace sharply limits her range of expression; Johnson, playing a Drew...