Word: contrivedness
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Scripted and directed by Joseph L. (A Letter to Three Wives) Mankiewicz, All About Eve is probably Hollywood's closest original approach to the bite, sheen and wisdom of high comedy. It crackles with smart, smarting dialogue. Sometimes at too earnest length, but mostly with wit and always with...
The Spanish Gardener (Little, Brown; $3) comes from the medicine chest of a real M.D., British-born A. (for Archibald) J. (for Joseph) Cronin. Dr. Cronin's compound is easier to swallow only because it is smaller. The story deals with the U.S. consul in a Spanish town, a...
Sunset Boulevard is crammed with detail-witty, revealing, evocative, sometimes contrived but always effective. Much of it, as the camera roams the Desmond mansion, sustains the mood of a good ghost story: a pet chimpanzee is solemnly buried by candlelight; the wind sighs through a pipe organ; rats scurry across...
Tactics & Techniques. King used Canada's new freedom of action in foreign affairs to draw his country closer to the U.S., integrating Canadian and U.S. defense systems and their wartime economies. Through all the changes in Canada's foreign relations and in the strain of World War II...
The script, huffing & puffing to find excuses for these athletic feats, tells an opéra-bouffe story involving Lancaster's "free men of the mountains," a foreign tyrant (Frank Allenby), and a fair lady (Virginia Mayo). Happily, their contrived heroics are spiked with some unconscious comedy.