Word: clair
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Said El Universal: "Through the hall of our great Bellas Artes Theater there reigned ... a contagious chilliness. ..." Said the English-language critic of Novedades: "It seemed the result of a desire to outdo Kostelanetz in misplaced lushness. All that remains now is to transcribe the work [Debussy's Clair de Lune]. . . for the Wurlitzer organ...
Featured in last week's Jacobowsky and the Colonel was Hollywood's pretty Annabella, wife of Cinemactor Tyrone Power. The French cinemactress-who rose to fame in Director René Clair's Le Million -was making her Broadway debut. Critic Rascoe charged from the show to his typewriter, abruptly started off: "An incredibly talentless actress who calls herself Annabella made me so spiritually ill last night that you can stop, right now, if you want to. . . . In my whole life (I give you my word) I have never seen or heard an actress botch up good lines...
That salute is characteristic of Preston Sturges' treatment of a theme which might more normally interest Theodore Dreiser or some true-confessions Dumas. Sturges, like René Clair, has always understood the liberating power of blending comedy and realism, wild farce and cool intellect. But the best of the domestic and anarchic satire cannot be suggested on paper; it is too thoroughly cinematic. It reaches its perfection in William Demarest, whose performance is one of the few solid-gold pieces of screen acting in recent years. But chief credit for The Miracle must go to Sturges, who has given...
...smashed before it has a chance to crystallize. Most of the finest human and comic potentialities of the story are lost because Sturges is so much less interested in his characters than in using them as hobbyhorses for his own wit. His good friend and master, René Clair, is near the heart of it when he says, "Preston is like a man from the Italian Renaissance: he wants to do everything at once. If he could slow down, he would be great; he has an enormous gift and he should be one of our leading creators. I wish...
After he made The 3Q Steps (1935), Hollywood had its eye on Hitchcock. He was not only England's leading director; he was, with Rene Clair, possibly the most brilliant of all directors of fiction films. In 1938 he signed with David O. Selznick, because he thought Selznick produced Hollywood's best pictures. But he takes no back talk from Selznick. As a result, he fares better than any other Selznick property. Selznick lend-leased Hitchcock to-20th Century-Fox to make Lifeboat for $200,000. Hitch pocketed...