Word: films
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Heiress (Paramount) is a handsomely mounted, sumptuously acted film about a wallflower whose only social grace is a neat hand at embroidery. Directed and produced by William Wyler (Wuttiering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives), The Heiress bears the Wyler trademark of painstaking high gloss. It is also a solid and impressive movie aimed at adults...
Based on a Broadway misinterpretation of Henry James's Washington Square, the film shows a timid, plain heiress (Olivia de Havilland) courted by a charming idler (Montgomery Clift). Her father (Ralph Richardson), who regards her as a hopelessly unlovable girl, turns her into just that. Using her inheritance as a weapon, he drives off the fortune hunter and blasts her only chance of happiness. The Heiress is something less than the stern and oppressive tragedy James wrote (for one thing, Olivia de Havilland's seductive shyness and warmth make her an unconvincing candidate for spinsterhood), but it still...
third-rate education in overcrowded, ram shackle schools. This documentary focuses on the painstaking three-year fight by plain citizens of Virginia's Arlington County to get better public education for their children. By glossing over their opposition (real-estate interests, a cynical political machine), the film passes up dramatic conflict. But as a detailed primer on rescuing a down-at-heels school system, it suggests a solid public service and offers inspiring evidence that aroused parents can get results when they take their problems into their own hands...
...background is another dramatic period of U.S. history: the fierce Indian uprisings that followed Custer's last stand. But despite hordes of hopping-mad Cheyennes in full war paint, there is not a first-class Injun fight in the whole film. For some unaccountable reason the hair-raising possibilities of authentic history have been submerged in the muddled and often maudlin story of an overaged cavalry officer (John Wayne) in a U.S. Army outpost. More unaccountably, the paste-pot yarn was put together by two veteran scripters: Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings...
Task Force. The ups & downs, through the years, of U.S. naval aviation, with a factual core of spectacular Navy combat film and fictional trimmings involving Gary Cooper (TIME...