Word: engell
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...Engel's luck is not always good. In many frames the camera cannot seem to find the speaker, and when it does cannot focus on his face. To give his picture a life like look, Engel uses no light except sunlight, so the film is sometimes muzzy sometimes (after a sudden change of sky) faulted with flare. Much of the time the actors' voices, picked up on the spot by a tape recorder, are muffled diffuse interrupted by bed squeaks, foot scrapes, street noises. But the sound is the sound the rooms have the look, the camera shares...
Weddings and Babies (Morris Engel Associates), as a technical exercise in cinema is one of the most exciting feature films the U.S. has produced in a decade. Shot mostly on Manhattan's Lower East side the picture was photographed, directed and partly written by Morris Engel, a shoestring independent whose 1953 movie, The Little Fugitive, scored a solid commercial success in the U.S., and in France made a cultural splash that helped to kick up the New Wave of creativity in French fiIms (TIME...
...story of Weddings is less important than the way it is told. Director Engel has attempted a sort of "candid cinema,' in which the principles of art are continuously (and sometimes unfortunately) subordinated to the flow of life. He often throws away his working script' encourages his actors to improvise. Then he moves around them with a portable camera and tracks the action as it develops, catching this, missing that, taking his chances and riding his luck...
...moment is anything but soap-operatic. The moviegoer suddenly finds himself wandering in the hero's personal hell and realizes not altogether happily that Engel's picture, most serious when it smiles is essentially a mordant reanimation of Orpheus-on Tenth Street...
...Story of Ruth (Samuel 6. Engel; 20th Century-Fox) is that rare film, a Bible story done with taste and without lions. It is true that if Writer Norman Corwin has not actually jazzed up the Old Testament's four brief chapters, he has at least given them a recognizable beat-here a child sacrificed to a flame-bellied god, there a few slaves squashed by a toppling idol. But the liberties are taken with considerable skill, and most of them make entertainingly dramatic sense. The Bible says nothing about the origins of the young Moabite widow who tells...