Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Happy Anniversary (Fields Productions; United Artists) is a vulgar, slick, hilarious film version of Anniversary Waltz (TIME, April 19, 1954), a common mattress farce, put together by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, that packed the Broadway tourists in for more than 17 months. The plot is just a house of comic greeting cards, but Chodorov and Fields, who also wrote the script, have stacked them up with impressive skill. David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor, it develops, are a big-city couple in the five-figure set who are celebrating their 13th anniversary. All goes well until Husband Niven gives...
Black Orpheus (Dispatfilm-Gemma; Lopert) is perhaps the most impressive can of film so far cast up on U.S. shores by the New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) of creation that has swept across the French movie industry. It is an amazing creation. The picture was made by Marcel Camus,* a 47-year-old assistant to some of France's top directors. In 1957 he found an adaptation of the Orpheus legend by a Brazilian poet and playwright named Vinicius de Moraes (TIME, Nov. 19, 1956), and for the hell of it he used the wildly poetic mountains around...
...possibly forget: Marpessa Dawn. "The poverty," says Camus, "was not such a bad thing in the long run. I spent so much time trailing around on foot, just looking, that in the end I had a deep awareness of Brazil. With money, I would never have made the same film. Everything would have been done too quickly...
...into a dance that is forever forming and dissolving and forming again. Seldom has the dance of life been imagined in such barbaric abandon of rhythm and hue, with such generous and innocent delight and reverence for the moment, whatever it may bring. These emotions pour through the film in a torrent and fill the performers, most of them amateurs, with the fervor of the creator's faith. It is a faith in nature, a worship of the sun and everything it shines on. Director Camus has realized in a passionately pagan work of art the Christian intuition...
Along with most of the arts in France, the cinema spent a long postwar period in the doldrums. But when De Gaulle came to power, his government announced that it did not intend to send good screen subsidies after the same old bad ideas. Reluctantly, French film producers, who are at least as conservative as their Hollywood cousins, agreed to try for something new and different. But would the public like...