Word: craftsmanship
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...story may be a vacuum, but Ford's accountants know that it sucks in quick box-office receipts (see above), especially when John Wayne plays the leathery colonel and Maureen O'Hara is his estranged (but not for long) lady. Ford's thoroughgoing craftsmanship, especially in his cleanly planned battle sequences, often invigorates Rio Grande. But it no longer quite makes up for his shoddy taste in material, nor can it satisfy moviegoers who remember him as the director of The Informer and The Grapes of Wrath...
...Guido Turchi, 34, follows a more conservative line ("I detest exclusiveness and dogma"), relies on fine craftsmanship and simplicity more than experimentation. His mild-mannered Piccolo Concerto, with its pensive string passages and brilliant tone colors, was the easiest to listen to of the three new works...
...pays the price of trying to do too much: document the Berlin airlift, take the measure of postwar Germany, sell democracy, and keep an audience entertained. At times the price seems heavy, but it is not too much to pay for a movie with enough originality, authenticity and skilled craftsmanship to set it apart from the production run of Hollywood...
Plausibility is the key to a western, as Mr. Ford well knows: what makes "Wagonmaster" especially unfortunate is that it shows all the craftsmanship of a fine one. Ford's feel for detail and character is excellent. He creates a traveling pitchman who runs out of water in the desert, and is found dead drunk after two days of guzzling Magic Elixir to alleviate his thirst. There is a Charles Addams-type family of half-witted bandits, and a wagon train of Mormon emigrants inspired by frequent bleats on a ram's horn. But Ford fails to weld these details...
Leach had brought 301 examples of his own hand craftsmanship with him to Washington. There were urns, vases, teacups, mugs and plates whose clean lines and subdued colors echoed the golden age of Chinese pottery. But none was slavishly Chinese and some were "modern." A first-class craftsman and connoisseur of oriental pottery, Leach is also an occidental, an artist, and his own man. The combination made for strength as well as refinement. His work argued even more forcefully for handcraft than his words...