Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Then came The Bridge on the River Kwai (TIME, Dec. 23). At one stroke, Actor Guinness was transformed from an interesting foreign name into a big Hollywood star. With one film he more than doubled his movie audience in the U.S.-Kwai will probably be seen by at least 50 million Americans, and stands to make more than $20 million. By his intricate, strongly moving portrayal of a British colonel at once stupid and heroic. Guinness repealed the casual popular impression that he is merely a sort of Stan Laurel for the intellectuals, and revealed himself as a dramatic actor...
...grand entrance. The other guests, deep in talk and Escalope de Veau Viennoise, were setups for a shrewd performance. But Guinness somehow managed to get through a crowd of 500 people without being particularly noticed. After dinner he shyly accepted the club's award as the Best Film Actor of 1957, and then a Columbia executive produced the Oscar. Applause. Alec fidgeted, looked bashfully pleased, mumbled a few words about the "many people in show business who helped me," sat down...
...They deepened when Director Lean informed him casually that he had really wanted Charles Laughton for the part. Alec brooded, and a couple of days later tried to quit. Lean talked him out of it. "Lean!" snarls one of the crew. "That bloody perfectionist! He shot 30 seconds of film a day and then sat on a rock and stared at his goddam bridge.'' Alec tried to quit again. Lean talked him out of it. For 3½ months the cast and crew sweated it out on jungle location. Poker and 16-mm. movies were the only relaxations...
...then back to the house to work on a script about Father Damien's leper colony-he wrote most of the scenario for The Horse's Mouth too. After The Horse's Mouth he is scheduled to make a film version of The Scapegoat, by Daphne du Maurier. And after that? "Just keep going on, I guess...
...film's entertainment value may have suffered from the passage of time and a transatlantic voyage. The sound is appalling, and the photography is jerkily primitive. Furthermore, the English titles are generally crowded off the bottom of the screen--but this is not too important, since Clair had no confidence in the new-fangled concepts of the talkies, and communicates anything important with the time-tested techniques of the silent film...