Word: ebb
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...film, credit goes to Navy-minded Director Lloyd Bacon, son of the late Actor Frank Bacon (Lightnin'). Director Bacon joined the Navy at the start of the World War, was commissioned as a photographic expert, now holds the rank of lieutenant-commander (reserve), spends vacations on navy cruises. Ebb Tide (Paramount). The tall tale, originally told by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, of the adventures of three beachcombers in a stolen schooner never bore up very well under literary scrutiny. But in the kindlier glow of cinema Technicolor, Ebb Tide's whoppers become leisurely implausibilities...
...Ebb Tide," the latest film in Technicolor, is a great disappointment; first, Director James Hogan falls in love with his blues and greens, second, for the most part the actors either overplay or underplay their parts, and third, the picture starts so slowly that one is led to believe that the first two reels are still sitting in the Back Bay luggage room...
...color, perhaps we have been spoiled by the perfection of "A Star Is Born," the color in the present film completely obscures both plot and character portrayal, and even with its black and white, "Hurricane" paints a far truer picture of the South Seas atmosphere than does "Ebb tide." Though Francis Farmer is a good enough excuse for forgetting a plot innumerable shots of a dilapidated schooner in a sunset...
...these days when screen action is swift and vivid and of absorbing interest, the growing luridness of "Ebb Tide" is not a pleasant change in cinematic diet but in spite of its spasmodic gait it does create tension in its closing minutes. Nevertheless one still goes home distracted by unanswered situations and incidental superfluities in the script. In short, "Ebb Tide" is not recommended...
They attribute the rise of dictatorships to the "spiritual exhaustion" of nations. "It is emotional fatigue which causes a people to abdicate in favor of supreme commissars or a reichsfuchrer or il duce. When the spiritual forces making for democracy are at a low ebb and the material conditions upon which mere existence depends are adverse, a vacuum is created into which a dictator may easily enter...