Word: clearing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From their vantage point in the press balcony of Philadelphia's Convention Hall last week (see cut*), TIME's editors had a clear view of the Republican Convention as a spectacle. Most of the real convention news, however, was made a mile and a half away in the hotels, where the Warren forces poured orange juice, the Taft people had iced tea and choral singing, the Stassenites produced a jazz band and cheese, and Deweyites held a fashion show...
...everything except five well-equipped Red army divisions hovering under the chestnuts of Potsdam ten miles away. Never before had a city of three million people, in time of "peace," been summoned to surrender before the threat of starvation, civil war within, or a bigger war without. It seemed clear by last week that, in the Communist Baedeker, Berlin was listed right after Prague...
There is little novel interpretation of character: even that might distract from the great language, or distort it. There is no clear placement in time, no outside world except blind sky, faint landscapes, ruminant surf, a lyrical brook. The camera, prowling and peering about the cavernous castle, creates a kind of continuum of time and space. Such castles were almost as naked of furniture as the Elizabethan stage; Olivier uses both facts to the film's advantage. Not even the costumes are distracting; they are close to the simplest mind's-eye image: a King & Queen like playing...
Scissors & Paste. Olivier was determined to make the play clear in every line and every word-even to those who know nothing of Shakespeare. For the most part, he manages to elucidate even the trickiest turns of idiom by pantomime or a pure gift for thought transference. But wherever it has seemed necessary, old words have been changed for new. Recks not his own rede becomes Minds not his own creed. In all, there are 25 such changes. Some are debatable, but the principle is sound. It is equally sound, of course, to cut the text. There are purists...
...crucial passages will disappoint some people. There is hardly a line that he speaks, or a gesture he makes, which falls short of shining mastery, in the terms in which he conceives the role. But the conception is in some important ways limited. It is clear that Olivier has a laudable distaste for the pompous, the pansy and the pathological Princes who have so often dishonored the poem. He sees-and plays -Hamlet as a brave, resolute, delicate-souled man who was required, as Goethe said, to do the one thing on earth which happened to be impossible for that...