Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...vast $3,000,000 pseudoreligious epic, is a travesty of the solemn pageant produced in 1911 by the late Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt's drama advanced through a series of large visions of the human condition, as successively they assailed a nun who had been lured from her convent by the Prince of this World, personified in a fluting cripple. Hollywood's version translates these noble obscurities into terms that the average moviegoer will more restfully recognize-right up to the moment when he falls asleep...
...lovers kiss, and the hurricane of their emotions, assisted by a battery of wind machines, bends saplings double. She flees the convent, and to judge by all the meteorological hell that breaks loose, the earth is fleeing the solar system too. Anyway, pretty soon a couple of gypsies (Katina Paxinou and Walter Slezak) drag the heroine off to live in their filthy caravan, where she hears that her dragoon is dead. She renounces religion and gives herself to a gypsy prince (Vittorio Gassman...
...Gustavo Rojo) to sin (Dennis King). Crowd scene follows crowd scene: theaters, bullfights, battles. She finds her dragoon again at the side of the "Iron Duke" just before the Battle of Waterloo, which is thrown in for good measure. In the end, of course, she goes back to the convent, and at this point it becomes painfully apparent that the moviemakers intend, even at the risk of sacrilege, to have their unleavened bread and eat it too. But after more than two hours of claptrap, audiences will probably be too tired to care, except about just one thing: Will Miracle...
...their merits, none seemed more certain to turn into a hot ticket than the new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music. A sentimental evening with the famous Trapp family of singers, the show tells the story of Maria Rainer (Mary Martin), the young postulant from an Austrian convent, whose love for a widower, Captain Georg von Trapp (Theodore Bikel), and his seven children displaces her desire to become a nun. As one theatergoer summed it up: "Nellie Forbush in The Nun's Story." The advance sale has already passed...
...idyl ends. The girl's family retrieves her, and she scrawls on a window with a diamond: "You will forget Henriette." Though heartbroken, Casanova goes on to innumerable other adventures. In Venice, he seduces a 15-year-old convent girl, then begins a violent affair with the beautiful nun who is her French teacher-fittingly enough, because she is also the mistress of the French ambassador. And so it goes. Yet he has not altogether forgotten Henriette. Years later, they will meet again. By that time she will be fat and Casanova feeble. As Havelock Ellis pointed...