Word: czinner
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Visually, Director Paul Czinner is content to let Rudolf Hartmann's production speak for itself. The perspective is from the center orchestra seats, with a wide view of the stage; there is little of the distracting crosscutting or ogling close-ups that later video directors have found so irresistible. One surprisingly awkward visual moment, though, occurs in the middle of the most famous line in the opera, the Marschallin's worldly wise "Ja, ja" as she withdraws from Octavian's life. Here the film leaps in mid-utterance from a long shot of Schwarzkopf to a close-up, calling attention...
...British stage and screen successes (Stolen Life, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Escape Me Never, Catherine the Great). But in the years just after the war, the Hollywood magic somehow gave out; Bergner appeared in a succession of stage flops, finally retired to London with her husband. Film Producer Paul Czinner. Last week's performance proved that her retirement had been premature...
...Trembling (adapted by Louis Paul from his novel Breakdown; produced by Paul Czinner and C. P. Jaeger) is a very exhaustive, and very exhausting, study of a dipsomaniac. It reveals Ellen Croy, a Manhattan newspaper columnist (Elisabeth Bergner), as a driven soul, harrowed by something in her life which she can neither exorcise nor explain. The play follows her step by step, relationship by relationship-boss (Anthony Ross), husband (Millard Mitchell), old friend (John Carradine)-down into the pit. Then it slowly drags her back into the light...
...Duchess of Malfi (by John Webster; adapted by W. H. Auden; produced by Paul Czinner), though one of the most famous of Elizabethan dramas, received its first Broadway production in 88 years. From a theatrical standpoint, there were possibly reasons to explain the delay. For all its magnificent flashes of drama and snatches of poetry, The Duchess moves slowly, mounts uncertainly, lets its fire go out between quick, bright blazes. It lacks, too, the humanity that a Shakespeare could fuse with horror; Webster's tale of the rich, widowed young Duchess who remarries in secret, fearing her rapacious brothers...
...Carrolls (by Martin Vale; produced by Robert Reud & Paul Czinner). For eight years-ever since Escape Me Never-versatile, Vienna-born Elisabeth Bergner has been searching for a new play to appear in on Broadway. The Two Mrs. Carrolls suggests that the search had become pretty desperate. From 8:40 to 10 it is just dull; from 10 o'clock on it is pretty fair melodrama...