Word: details
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While the picture belongs to Brando, it is a nice question whether The Missouri Breaks is worth owning. Penn has peopled it with interesting, unfamiliar faces, and shot it with obviously strong feelings for the landscape and period detail of the 1880s. Yet the strong technique is enlisted in the service of a very modest irony that has become one of the basic banalities of the modern western. Once again, the works of nature are shown to have grandeur and innocence, while the works of man are everywhere perceived as squalid pollutants...
Thanks in large part to some good period detail by Director Gordon Parks and a fine performance by Roger E. Mosley in the title role, Leadbelly at least maintains a degree of dignity and professionalism that sets it apart from such charades as Lady Sings the Blues. Parks shows a careful eye for small evocative details on ragged stretches of back-country roads in Texas and Louisiana and for the full-dress promenade on Fannin Street, the wickedest thoroughfare in Shreveport and surely the sprightliest...
...cause moral blind spots that bring about his downfall. Agnew's characters are stiff in the joints but serviceable. The settings -Washington, Iran, the interior of Air Force Two-are described with cursory authority, while Agnew's descriptions of beautiful women are done with lingering attention to detail...
...time, from Washington to Spain to upstate New York. Hellman intersperses her stories of lawyers and committee rooms with anecdotes about clothes and cabdrivers and manure and stage-hands pouring bourbon down her throat. The stories are exquisite in and of themselves because Hellman has a sharp memory for detail and is a master storyteller. But because the stories break up the passage of events in her book, they destroy the buildup of dramatic tension. Hellman's last segment begins with the words "Nothing more was to happen to me." She deliberately avoids the high tragic ending of all stories...
...Fellini's penchant for detail is no laughing matter. Filming a Venice canal sequence in an outdoor tank, the maestro ordered 200 rats into the water. "Stop!" he shouted after noticing that half the rats were white: "Paint them brown." His hard-pressed casting staff is often given a sketch of a type of face he wants and ordered off to the back alleys of Rome in search of their prey. For Fellini, the right face is everything. "I chose Sutherland because he is completely alien to the conventional idea of Casanova-the dark-eyed Italian, magnetic, raven locks...