Word: directorate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Orson Welles said it best. Confronted by Hollywood's movie-making paraphernalia, he chortled: "This is the biggest electric train any boy ever had to play with." Broadway Choreographer-Director Bob Fosse obviously felt the same exhilaration. But all he could do with that expensive equipment was play around. The result is a chuffing, tooting, O-gauge musical, Sweet Charity...
Charity began in 1957 as the title character of Nights of Cabiria, an Italian sleeper about a Punchinello prostitute. The director-writer was Federico Fellini; the star was his wife, Giulietta Masina. Maintaining the tradition, Fosse turned the film into a Broadway musical starring his wife, Gwen Verdon, as a heart-of-gold "hostess" named Charity Hope Valentine...
Fosse the director is sometimes redeemed by Fosse the choreographer. But it is the score however, that remains the show's real strength. Cy Coleman's hip-flip music flows freely from pure ballad (Where Am I Going?) to Bachish parody (Rhythm of Life). Dorothy Fields, 63, won an Oscar for the lyrics of The Way You Look Tonight back in 1936. She may win another for her insistence on writing wittily for the characters instead of warily for the charts...
...Director Terence Young brings a stuffy, stilted style to the proceedings that's always good for a laugh between the lines. The players miraculously managed to keep straight faces throughout, although Miss Deneuve carries this to excess by freezing into an astonishing replica of Grace Kelly at her most glacial. As Omar moans appropriately, "I have no authority. I'm just the puppet prince." It shows...
...Director Andrew V. McLaglen seems to have made the movie while his mind was on something else-probably quitting time. Katharine Ross, Dustin Hoffman's sidekick in The Graduate, plays Duke's daughter with an understandable lack of enthusiam. A few more parts like this and she'll be about as well remembered as Vera Hruba Ralston...