Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...freak. Then an enterprising young (22) junkman named Louis Burt Mayer came to town and laid out $600 as a down payment on a onetime burlesque house. Mayer hid the shoddy past of his theater with a coat of white paint, installed an organ, and dug up a religious film called From the Manger to the Cross. His opening was a socko success. The lines of ticket buyers taught L. B. Mayer a lesson he never forgot: Americans want simple, clean entertainment...
When this sort of thing was offered to U.S. moviegoers in the first film version (1942) of Graham Greene's thriller, This Gun for Hire, many of them were deeply impressed. It was felt that Hollywood had passed a milestone and that He (Alan Ladd) and She (Veronica Lake) were the latest and the greatest. In the interval, however, most customers have learned, from Hollywood's mistakes, the difference between the touchingly insane and the pathetically inane, and this remake is less apt to frazzle nerves than to tickle funny bones...
Last week, with La Bardot's most notorious film doing record business in Manhattan, and another set to open soon, U.S. moviegoers had a chance to see what all the European excitement is about. It adds up to a brouhaha in a bias...
...husband can see what's inside and the audience can't. But by this time, the spectator, if he happens to be grownup, may not be looking anyway. If sex is the object, there is just about as much to be seen in almost any Hollywood film, and in promulgating Brigitte as a full-blown enchantress, the French have clearly sent a girl to do a woman...
Bluestone has written a fascinating and provocative book that should be of interest to all who view the future of the film with optimism--or pessimism--and to all who are interested in both these prime vehicles for cultural expression...