Word: donen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...deep-focus photography and its merciless character analysis of that special U.S. phenomenon, the self-made mogul. John Ford's Stagecoach brought the western up from the dwarfed adolescence of cowboy-and-Injun adventures to the maturity and stature of a legend. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain proved again the ingenuity of U.S. moviemakers to bring fresh style to the format of musical comedy, which, like jazz, remains an authentically American art form...
...ROAD. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney flash backwards and forwards on a twelve-year marital fray-for-all neatly scripted by Frederic Raphael (Darling) and cleverly directed by Stanley Donen (Charade...
...share of scars in the jungle war between the sexes. As her mate, a self-centered architect, Finney is not so fortunate, and seems curiously unsympathetic in helping to turn his marriage into a fray-for-all. Happily, whenever the strife skitters closer to tragedy than comedy, Director Stanley Donen takes the viewer's eye off the brawl by ushering in William Daniels and Eleanor Bron parodying a WASPish American and his shrewish wife, or Claude Dauphin, whose jet-set bore is a perfect putdown...
...salt what it lacks in plot, although his dialogue, as Don Marquis once put it, sometimes merely strokes a platitude until it purrs like an epigram ("The only thing that fits into a pigeonhole is a pigeon"). Flashing back and forth through twelve years of togetherness and apartheid, Director Donen makes sure that this particular Road never quite reaches a dead end. In the final moments, Hepburn and Finney, reconciled, look lovingly at each other in the car. He sighs, "Bitch." She snaps, "Bastard...
...Director Donen dissipates his cast's effectiveness by having everyone affect a tone of languorous boredom, presumably as a clue that Arabesque belongs in the realm of sophisticated comedy. To mask weaknesses and justify the movie's title, Donen puts his camera to a series of Olympian trials, filming at dizzying angles through, under, or into the reflections of sunglasses, grillwork, optical tools, windshields, mirrors, table tops, television screens and the chromium trim of a Rolls-Royce. The cinematic busywork offers sporadic fun, but also suggests the unsteady posture of a show that always seems about to fall...