Word: film
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though Sportscaster Bill Slater now ingratiatingly explains what is happening on the screen (apparently for the benefit of the blind), the film itself remains a brilliant solo on the optic nerve. Some memorable passages...
After a military victory that Hitler demanded but didn't get, Metropolitan Basso Alexander Kipnis and Cousin Leonid, who had bought negatives of the film from the U.S. Alien Property Custodian, made a distribution deal with United Artists. Last week, under the title Kings of the Olympics, Leni's work began its first general U.S. showing. Leni would scarcely recognize her handiwork...
Gone are the long, fawning close-ups of the Führer, gone the Wagnerian surges on the sound track to underline every German victory. Gone is any suggestion that the Germans (even hard-working Leni) had anything to do with the film; the distributors are taking no chances with U.S. public opinion. By shrewd editing, a 260-minute heil to German athletic prowess has been reduced to a 92-minute rah-rah for the All-American...
...throw, Duvivier carefully hedged his bet. His script tore down Tolstoy's complex scaffolding of historico-religious theory, eliminated the subplots, preserved only the central study of a falling woman, with a few glimpses of the high society she fell from. This might have been sufficient if the film had also saved a suggestion of the dreadful glacier-creep of Tolstoy's characterization. Instead, the camera work is uniformly uninspired, and the psychological glacier dissolves into teary slush...
...really two movies-one in the background, the other in the foreground. The background is an album of postwar Germany: a series of malignantly beautiful photographs of rubbled cities, taken with a depth of focus that clarifies the fear in every handful of dust. Unfortunately, the view of this film is frequently obstructed by the one in front of it, which has a certain frightful clarity of its own. It concerns an American (Robert Ryan), a Briton, a Frenchman and a Russian who unite to rescue a famous advocate of Peace (Paul Lukas) from the Nazi underground, but then ride...