Word: dross
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GIVEN CHAYEFSKY'S obvious if sublimated talent and Scott's ability to turn even dross into gold, Hospital is a wretched disappointment. I laughed through most of it, including the purportedly serious parts, and enjoyed myself. A literate television show, in good color and on a large screen, is not fundamentally so unbearable. Scott plays a magnificant wreck of a man, overbearing yet sympathetic, cold because of despair, not heartlessness. Seen first obliquely from behind, he looks like a Grecian noble deep in thought until the camera tracks around to reveal his less-than-heroic profile and the clutter following...
...where Williams claims to have transformed the dross for which he contracted into something quite other, the finished film belies his stated intentions. In fact, Dealing is not only the weakest of Williams' three films to date; it also erodes one's respect for the two that preceded it. Out of it, Williams' first piece of work, remains a pleasant enought autobiographical account of adolescence on Long Island during the first half of the sixties. Shooting in black and white, Williams was careful to set up a series of well-constructed situations as he played off his schlemiel (Barry Gordon...
...perhaps most striking of the collaborators is photographer Gordon Willis. His lighting captures the muffled diffusion of city sun, the dank swank of a resort ballroom, the verdant warmth of a mid-afternoon in the park. Last year his talent was used only to dress up the dross of End of the Road -a film which burst apart by emphasizing the presence of violence, and not its causes; here he contributes to the success of a minor masterpiece which takes a very cool, bitterly funny look at some very harsh truths...
...MARTIN RITT hasn't transformed the dross of The Great White Hope into a good film, at least his jumbling of theatrical convention and film cliche makes it fairly easy to watch. Despite playwright Howard Sackler's screenplay, and his play's prime standing as a Kultcha classic, Ritt hasn't stooped to the traditional homage Hollywood usually pays to Broadway hit-dom. The Great White Hope is severely divided, but many of the tensions the black actors manage to convey are true. At certain points-particularly when the splendid Moses Gunn, as an anachronistic black nationalist street preacher, accosts...
...banks have taken over one of the last of the big spreads, and Monte and Chet hire on for want of more respectable work. Chet eventually gives it all up to wed the hardware-store widow, but Monte won't relinquish his ways even for the golden-hearted, dross-tongued whore (Jeanne Moreau) he loves. By the time the film ends, just about everyone has been killed off except Marvin and Director Wil liam Fraker, who might well have been the first target...