Word: filming
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...total effect of this picture is one of strength and simplicity and unquenchable sincerity. Somehow--the reasons cannot be ticked off "one, two, three"--Viscount de la Grandiere, the producer, and Maurice Cloche, the director, have managed to overcome the threats of didacticism and dullness, and have made a film of power and grandeur...
...Connecticut Yankee" is the kind of film which you either view with mild amusement or dislike roundly. This is because it is culled from an excellent book and some people, finding the picture not up to the stratospheric standard of the book, thereupon turn violently against it. I, being merely a partisan and not a worshipper of Sam Clemens, could still scrape up a few chuckles...
...Citizen Kane" was Orson Welles' baby. He was the first person ever commissioned by a studio to write, direct, produce and star in a single film, and the result of his multiple activity became a movie classic...
Apart from the actual plot, the aspect of "Citizen Kane" for which it will always be famous is Welles' use of his cameras. The photography is magnificent. Although professionals usually say that these camera effects are consciously "unusual," to an ordinary moviegoer they make the film memorable. The wildly shifting perspectives, the entirely new treatment of three-dimensional effects, the odd angles of approach, and the relation of lights and shadows contribute at least as much drama as the script...
Undoubtedly if all film directors were to adopt Welles' camera technique, films would become unbearable. Even in "Citizen Kane" the overpowering effects become a little heavy toward the end. If carried to its logical extreme, this sort of thing results in horrors like "Ivan the Terrible." However, as long as "unusual" effects remain just that, they can add immeasurably to the power of a film...