Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...survivors stands on a hill everlooking the remains of the bridge, its builder, and its destroyers, murmuring, for very good reason, "Madness...madness." Such fine touches of irony pervade the film, giving it a refreshing tartness that most war movies lack. Boulle has packed into his screenplay all the elements a good war movie ought to have: torture, escape, death, destruction, heroism, sacrifice, and so forth. But everything is seen freshly, with the eye of an artist instead of a hack...
David Lean's direction is marred only by too slow a pace: the film did not need to run quite so close to three hours. He made brilliant use of the genuine tropical jungle against which the film was made. Scenes of marching men, jungles, hills and rivers are all tremendously effective in their CinemaScopic splendor, and the bridge goes up with a rousing blast. Moreover, every frame is closely bound up with the story: spectacle complements action instead of interfering with...
...Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris; Allied Artists) offers a Quasimodo (Anthony Quinn) who is as ugly as an iguana, but as lovable as a kitten and no more frightening. In two earlier filmings of Victor Hugo's romance, Lon Chaney (1923) and Charles Laughton (1939) took care to spook the audience out of its wits before building up sympathy for the. lovesick, crookbacked bell ringer. But the current Technicolor version (with a French supporting cast, dubbed-in English) introduces Notre Dame's resident troll tenderly stroking a pigeon on one of the cathedral's balustrades...
Several months ago a man with a motion picture camera went whirring about the community filling reel after reel with scenes of life at Harvard. At the same time, presumably, diligent young men were burrowing away at film archives around the nation in an attempt to discover motion pictures of the late and great of Harvard College. The result is the featurette now playing at the Exeter--To the Age That Is Waiting...
...film was made for alumni consumption by the Program for Harvard College, so considerable time is spent on old film strips of the tercentenary celebration, speeches by ex-Presidents of Harvard, and film relics of Professors Kittredge, Briggs, and Hooton. The result is an interesting hodgepodge which will probably raise a few familiar faces, some memories, and enough money, but it will not win any awards for acting, photography, continuity or unity of presentation...