Word: cinemas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Like many another successful director (Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, William Wyler, etc.), Stevens learned his cinema technique on the roughhouse, two-reel comedy lots, where everyone from prop boy to producer had a hand in the story and no one knew how it was going to end. That is known as "shooting off the cuff," and Stevens does just that today with most of his pictures...
...Spirit (Disney) reveals the astonishing fact that one of the world's most beloved cinema actors earns less than $50 a week. That miserable retainer not only has to support himself in the extravagant style to which Hollywood is accustomed, but also has to feed, clothe and house his three adopted nephews. This underpaid box-office paragon: Donald Duck...
Although the cartoon does not make the new short-form blank crystal clear, it gets its propaganda across with the anesthetic blessing of laughter and great good humor. As cinema, The New Spirit is a most effective job. It has a brand-new patriotic melody, The Yankee Doodle Spirit (composed in one day by Oliver Wallace, who did the Dumbo tunes), which is a humdinger...
Sullivan's Travels (Paramount). Scenarist Preston Sturges, who became a cinema director two years ago, has successively and refreshingly satirized U.S. machine politics (The Great McGinty), advertising (Christmas in July), and the boy-meets-girl formula (The Lady Eve). He now aims his brisk sarcasm at the moviemakers themselves...
Some of Sturges' slapstick sequences (a Keystone cops' auto chase; no less than four people shoved into the swimming pool) are a waste of film and satire. But many another is classic cinema-especially the scene of a Negro pastor cautioning his flock against showing their superiority over the convicts who are coming to share the parishioners' Sunday night Mickey Mouse movie...