Word: dillman
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...moments, Circle is peculiarly square. Hero Dillman, who looks like a clothes dummy in a department-store college shop, just cannot make reasonable people believe he is really standing up to those nasty studio Nazis. Suzy Parker, the famous photographer's model who plays his girl friend, spends most of the picture staring stupefied at the baggy old lieutenant's uniform her part requires, and no wonder; she looks like a flamingo in a horse blanket. On the other hand, Nigel Balchin's script would pass the strictest muster; Jack (The Captain's Table...
Curtiz was also briefly hampered by a gentle jurisdictional dispute between the two Franciscan orders in Assisi-the brown-cloaked Friars Minor and the black-clothed Conventuals-over the color of the saint's robe. But Skouras' Vatican-connected authority happily ruled that Bradford (A Certain Smile) Dillman, as Francis, should wear grey...
Ironically, Francis of Assisi was roughest of all on the animals. While Curtiz eliminated the sermon to the birds as "too corny," Dillman was still required to bless a menagerie ranging from dogs to ducks. And in the closing minutes of the film-shot in Rome on golden sand previously hallowed by Ben-Hur's chariot tracks -the director decided to foreshadow Francis' death by depicting a raven on a desolate limb. Explained a Curtiz assistant: "We had three ravens in Assisi; one died of cold, and another flew the coop. Some body shut a car door...
...characters are arranged in two crudely congruent triangles. In the first, a back-street belle (Greco) shares her bed and board with a dirty old man (Welles) because he supports her illegitimate children. But now and then she likes a little excitement (Dillman) on the side. When the old man gets jealous, the young lovers strangle him, meat-saw the remains into portable pieces, and are caught when they try to dump the evidence at a construction site...
...this point the first triangle intersects the second, which is composed of a greying eminence (Welles) of the trial courts, his svelte young mistress (Greco), and her secret preference (Dillman), who happens to be the old man's legal assistant. The assistant is of course assigned to defend the meat-saw murderess, and after running around in triangles for an hour or so, the script comes at last to the predictable courtroom climax in which an awful lot of poetic justice is noisily done...