Word: evening
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...result, Leslie Bricusse was given license to inflict ten songs. Like the pupils' Latin lessons, the lyrics will not pass scrutiny ("He smiled. I smiled. We smiled. And the sky smiled too."); the melodies are scarcely more tuneful than a piece of hard chalk drawn across a blackboard. Even with O'Toole's oddly moving Sprechgesang and Clark's perfect phrasing, the numbers never add up to a score...
...first directorial assignment, Herbert Ross lights Clark's songs as if she were doing a turn on This Is Tom Jones, and tends to place his camera at jarring angles. He even mounts it on the V-l, making the viewer feel like a patient of Dr. Strangslove. No matter. It is one of the graces of group art that if any one can destroy a project, so any one can save it. Mr. Chips is barely enough because Mr. O'Toole is more than enough...
Manifestly, Ginsberg intends his static film to be a set of X rays. Instead it is only a suite of poses. Even the nude sex scenes are filmed in a chiaroscuro that shows far more scuro than chiaro. As does the script. Ginsberg begins with a Pascal epigraph, but on his own he produces bromides: "Why am I telling you all this?"; "I hate men, they degrade you for being a female"; "I crave nothingness . . . not to die, to live! To become! To find myself!" The stars complement the dialogue. The shrink should be dosed with adrenaline; Torn plays...
...Victorian novel as the life it reflected. His story unfolds amid quotations from the prophets of the age (Marx, Darwin, Tennyson), factual footnotes (married farm laborers at that time, he reports, got twice the wages given bachelors), and provocative sociological speculations (the Victorians, he suggests, may have enjoyed sex even more than our own oversexed century, because they practiced it less frequently). The purpose of all this is to place his characters, as no Victorian novelist could have, in a long perspective as exemplars of the historical currents of their time...
Becker's story is based on a real incident. On May 11, 1865, 32 days after Lee surrendered and 18 days before President Andrew Johnson declared an amnesty for all rebel soldiers, a Union firing squad executed Thomas Martin outside Cincinnati for being a Confederate guerrilla-even though the case against him was never proved...