Word: catchingly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...readers. Busy Author Stuart, who wrote nearly 20 books in 20 years, including the rawboned poetry of Man with a Bull-Tongued Plow and bestselling Taps for Private Tussie, used to live at top speed. Then, two years ago, at 47, rushing from a lecture in Murray, Ky. to catch a chartered plane for another speaking date in Illinois, he was brought crashing to earth by a severe heart attack...
While Commander Mature-for whom it seems to be much easier to catch an octopus than to pronounce it-strains his brains over a problem of chemistry that turns out to be about as difficult as mixing a highball, the moviegoer has plenty of time to enjoy the seascapes off Cuba, where the film was made, and to get monumentally bored by the story. Things pick up toward the end, though, when Actor Mature himself takes to the water to make the final test. For a little while, as the sharks circle closer and closer, there seems...
...grey-toned realismo is hardly a match for the novel's. In its transposition to the screen, the story retains its rather sudsy plot but has lost the perceptive insights that stitched the novel into a meaningful tale. In fleeting images, however, the movie does at times catch the heroine's fatalistic amorality, the pathos of her situation, and even the sense that this ignorant girl has capacities of emotion surpassing those of her "respectable" lovers...
...lifted it out of any specific time and place and has wrapped it in the mists of something resembling fantasy. His photography is excellent. Like an uninvited guest, the camera peeps out between swaying curtains to take in the soft tones of a series of lush interiors and to catch, as if by accident, the people who sport in them. As a result, an aura of perfume seems to hang over the production--seductive, but faintly corrupt...
...operetta medium itself. What is most inspired and Voltairian about Candide must plague operetta writing. Voltaire's book is much better suited to a film, which could approximate the breakneck pace and have a field day with the calamities; or to pure opera, which wholly through music could catch the book's speed, glancing wit and mocking elan...