Word: curtiz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...highly colored, overwhimsical film version suffers because Director Michael Curtiz seems unable to decide whether he is reading from a fairy tale or a police blotter. Sometimes the archness is laid on with a trowel, sometimes the trifling action stops dead for overdetailed explanations. Bogart plays his role pretty straight; Aldo Ray is disconcertingly elfin for an alleged sex fiend; and Ustinov's mugging seems overdone. Basil Rathbone and John Baer wander onscreen long enough to look properly villainous. Joan Bennett and Gloria Talbott add their pretty confusions to the artificial turmoil. Technicolor gives the picture a fairly handsome...
...technical departments are, of course, the true stars of such an overwhelming spectacle as this, and Director Michael Curtiz (Captain Blood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) deserves to be ranked for his managerial marvels with the general contractor who put up the pyramids...
...Bogart has acquired a brassy air of confidence and command. There is a look of real kingliness about him as he stands, painted, costumed and toupeed ("The rug, old boy, the rug"), barking like a strangled seal to warm up his pipes before a tender scene. Veteran Director Michael Curtiz remembers with rueful admiration how Bogie, in the midst of a long, dramatic speech that would have had many an actor sweating with nerves, snarled, during a moment out of mike range, "God, I'm hungry...
...their script Jerry Wald and Michael Curtiz, producer and director respectively, have adapted an incident from Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not." They have sacrificed nothing in the transition: the dialogue retains all of Hemingway's sharpness, and his simple, compact plot is still as clear and as interesting as ever...
Perhaps Weld and Curtiz intended that the photography not be an outstanding feature of the picture. There are no special angle shots, nothing unusual. Thus the acting and the script stand out so much more for their excellence...