Word: curtiz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...problem goes deeper than Nichols' consistent substitution of trickiness for style. A great director, Rosselini or Hitchcock, plans his film as a totality, understanding instinctively how each shot relates to the film as a whole; a competent director of narrative films like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) plans shots with relation to the entire scene. Nichols, however, cannot plan past a given shot, and although a frame may contain an effective gimmick, camera angle, or background detail, the scenes themselves are purposeless and disconnected, largely due to awkward and self-conscious editing...
Grand Illusion evoked nostalgia for the comfortable 1914 world that charmed the audiences of the thirties and continues to charm viewers today. Renoir's screenplay innovations (like the famous "Marseillaise" Scene that Micheal Curtiz lifted for Casablanca) were well supported by three superb performances from Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin, and Erich von Stroheim...
...Days Now. Professionally, he has always been on top. His specialty is light comedy, and in it he has no peers. Summing up Grant's talent, Director Michael Curtiz once said, "Some men squeeze a line to death, Cary tickles it into life." But good light comedy is still little more than exquisite froth, and Cary Grant has never won an Academy Award. "I don't quite understand all the fuss over this so-called realism," he complains. "Is a garbage can any more realistic than Buckingham Palace...
Died. Michael Curtiz (pronounced Curtease), 73, Oscar-winning (for Casablanca) Hollywood director, a leathery Hungarian import who, in a 35-year career spent largely with Warner Bros., directed 80-odd films ranging from blood and thunder (The Charge of the Light Brigade) to canned Americana (White Christmas), was famed for his malapropisms ("Make a love nest") and his gall (he cut the sermon to the birds out of Francis of Assist as "too corny"), but stubbornly insisted "I put all the art into my pictures I think the audience can stand"; of cancer; in Hollywood...
After 45 years of riding the neighborhood circuits, the pure-bred Hollywood hay-burner sure is a sorry hunk of horseflesh. But this time, Director Michael Curtiz gives the critter a tolerable tricky ride. He rowels out a few bursts of speed, and when there's nothing left but wheezes he plays them for horse laughs...