Word: filming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...worst thing about Goldwyn's Porgy, though, is its cinematic monotony. The film is not so much a motion picture as a photographed opera. Just to make sure the customers get the point, Vienna-born Director Otto Preminger has directed most of it as though it were a Bayreuth production of Gōtterdāmmerung, Choruses march and countermarch; actors lumber woodenly about the stage, obviously counting their steps, and then suddenly take up a stance and break into song. And for some strange, wrong reason -perhaps to give the show an elevated, operatic tone-the actors speak...
Visually, The Nun's Story is almost dazingly beautiful. The colors are rich and sensuous, the light innocent and cool; and when light and color play together on the medieval stones of Bruges or Brussels, the screen glows like an awakened frame of old Vermeer. Dramatically, the film has been admirably conceived and impressively executed. Religiously, it is rather shallow. There is merit in the picture's painstaking effort to convey the physical reality of convent life, but somewhere the spiritual reality is lost. The radiant pageant of devotion ravishes the senses, but it does not touch...
...Story (at the Metropolitan). This two-and-a-half hour film is an informative, comprehensive, unglamorized version of Katherine Hulme's novel about a Belgian girl's glorious failure in attempting to be a worthy nun. It should appeal to non-Catholics and non-believers as well as Catholics. The picture has a fine screenplay by Robert Anderson '39, firm direction by Fred Zinnemann, and beautiful color photography. Audrey Hepburn in the title role give a flawless performance; and more than able assistance is provided by Mildred Dunnock, Dame Edith Evans, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Peter Finch, and others...
Room at the Top (at the Kenmore). Perhaps the best British film since Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins teamed up in The Prisoner, this is a deeply penetrating and significant study of English sex and society, with some of the frankest and most adult dialogue ever to come across the screen. As an aging mistress, Simone Signoret gives a devastating performance that justifiably won the Cannes Festival's award for the "best performance by an actress." Named "best picture of the year, 1959" by the British Film Academy...
Paths of Glory (at the Brattle, Friday and Saturday). The Saturday Review last year acclaimed this as "the best picture of the year." It is a tough, uncompromising, hard-hitting film about the French army during World War I. Several countries considered it too strong for their audiences and refused to allow it to be shown. In it, Kirk Douglas shows for once that...