Word: celluloidal
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Once More, With Feeling. The Broadway comedy loses some of its intimate wickedness in cold celluloid, but offers a last look at the late Kay Kendall, a lovely clown with a touch of genius...
...picture, though filmed in Eastman Color of a particularly somber and romantic richness, has the inevitable inadequacies of photographed theater. The warmth of the living illusion is lost in cold celluloid, and the creative gesture of the camera is frustrated. As the camera wanders uncertainly through the theater, often too close to the action, often too far away, the spectator begins to feel as if he is traipsing about in search of a seat...
...this sea of celluloid, a masterful director, William (Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives') Wyler, has fished a whale of a picture, the biggest and the best of Hollywood's super-spectacles. The story of Ben-Hur is reasonably faithful to the general's stirring "Tale of the Christ." Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a rich Jew born about the same time as Christ, falls out with his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), commander of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, who demands that Ben-Hur inform against other Jewish patriots. When Ben-Hur refuses...
...Lady & Barbershop Quartet. How could a show, blended with such fine old period pieces as a player piano, a sputtering mayor, a fat lady who dances, a plain-Jane librarian-even a redheaded lisping boy and a celluloid-dickeyed barbershop quartet-make the grade on coldhearted Broadway? Talent is only part of the answer. Many an able combination of stage talent has been hooted off the boards on opening night. In this case, there happened to be a just-right blending of first-rate talents...
...celluloid rubble of Novelist Hayes's Hollywood ("to see or be seen ... to eat or be eaten") seems unreal. And his people, though carefully and competently labeled, are also carefully unexplored, as if he were afraid that the characters, if given life, would twist out of control. But Hayes is tellingly accurate about the emotions of bored bed partners who do not even 'like each other, and sometimes eloquent about the vacant longings of pretty, light-dazzled girls: "If they expected her to resist, or any of the girls like her, then it would have been wiser...