Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...incident marks one of the few victories for the English during the dismal opening months of the war, and it makes an exciting story. Unfortunately, the new English film which describes the death of the Graf Spee fritters away most of the excitement. It is an unfocused, chaotic motion picture which makes clear only that the German ship sank...
...evident-from what is easily the strongest moment in the film-that the moviemakers regard a passionate adultery as a minor offense, compared to a loveless marriage. In the latter case, the offense is against nature, and nature is the standard in this picture...
Divorced. Brigitte ("BB") Bardot, 23, cinema's toothsome French pastry (And God Created Woman, Please! Mr. Balzac), and French film Writer-Producer Roger Vadim, 29; after three years of marriage; in a Paris court that found each "equally guilty of seriously insulting" the other...
Ordet (Palladium; Kingsley International) is that rarest of delights for the fastidious eye, a film by Carl Dreyer. Dreyer, 68, is a Dane who has made his living as a newsman and his reputation as a cinematic creator on the strength of a half-dozen pictures that few people have seen. Only two have been generally noticed in the U.S. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was considered by most critics "an experimental film," but it has since served serious moviemakers as an invaluable primer on the uses of the closeup. Day of Wrath (1948) was a tenebrous expatiation...
Ordet (The Word) is another religious film of the same midnight-sunny Scandinavian sort. Based on a play of the same title by Kaj Munk, the Danish pastor and playwright who was murdered, probably on Gestapo orders, in 1944, the picture does not tell a story so much as it poses an allegory. A village divided by religious faction into "life-affirming" and "death-seeking" sects is intended to signify what is rotten in the state of Denmark's soul, and in the world's as well. Because of this tragic split, the true faith-symbolized...