Word: epical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Jungle Book (Korda; United Artists) is a bold attempt by the epic-minded Brothers Korda (Producer Alexander and Director Zoltan) to make Kipling's beloved animal fable of Mowgli, the Hindu boy who was raised by jungle wolves, into a movie. It can't be done. The myth-destroying movie camera produces a laborious, sometimes silly tale, saved from disgrace only by some of the best Techni-colored animal photography extant...
Star of the beast epic is Shere Khan (real name: Roger), a magnificent half-Bengal, half-Sumatran tiger who is out to get Mowgli (Sabu, the young Hindu who starred in Elephant Boy). The ominous supporting cast includes some 2,000 animals, birds and reptiles-notably a slinky black panther (Bagheera) with a sinister propensity for sharpening his lethal claws on tree limbs, an enormous python (Kaa, who had to be controlled with a blow torch), and a very unpleasant cobra...
...Conquistador, an epic of Cortes' conquest of Mexico...
...Robinson a passable newspaper editor, "Unholy Partners" is a fairly entertaining cross between the rise of a modern tabloid and the familiar gangster story. If they had cut the pretty blurbs about the ethics of American journalism, this film would have been a well paced cops-and-robbers epic. As it stands, the action sags hopelessly about every fifteen minutes and Hollywood getting out a newspaper remains strictly authentic Hollywood, strictly unauthentic journalism. Laraine Day's presence is welcome, not so much because she loves Robinson bravely to the bitter end, but because we know at last she's safe...
Joyce's three major works are seen by Levin as a progression from the lyric form, in which the creation and the artist are inextricably intertwined, to the epic in which the creation is in mediate relation between the artist and others, to the dramatic, in which it is in immediate relation to others. "Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man" exemplifies the first phase, "Ulysses" the second, and "Finnegan's Wake" the last. If it might seem to some readers that the last two have achieved only the most tenuous relationship with "others," Levin's study does much...