Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Negro scriptwriter named John O. Killens, but mostly to Actor Ryan, a menace who can look bullets and smile sulphuric acid. But the tension is released too soon-and much too trickily. The spectator is left with a feeling that is aptly expressed in the final frame of the film, when the camera focuses on a street sign that reads: STOP-DEAD...
Changed Scene. Outstanding among the young realists is 31-year-old John Bratby (TIME, March 12, 1956), who was called in to paint Gulley Jimson's big-footed canvases in the film version of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. "It's illogical and mad," Bratby confessed afterwards, "and springs from God knows where, but when the spotlight's on me, I feel enormously encouraged." Last week the spotlight was on Bratby again, with a show in London's Zwemmer Gallery of 28 new oils, turned out at a stupendous clip...
...script has been knowledgeably written by Playwright Lee, and directed by Joseph (The Matchmaker) Anthony with a sure sense of the theatrical moment. Actor Franciosa gives much the most coherent performance of his film career and he is fairly well supported by Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. The main trouble with the picture is the perhaps inevitable one that the characters are so actorish and attitudinous that they come to seem phony, and their problems unreal. They are so passionately and exclusively interested in themselves that the spectator may sensibly conclude that they do not need any interest from...
...20th Century-Fox). In a sneak preview of this film at a Manhattan movie theater, a woman in the roped-off guest section raised her voice in the dark to cry: "Good heavens, how could Hank have accepted such a role?" There on the screen, prancing awkwardly in mandarin robes, flamenco suits, a clown costume, a silly goatee, was Henry Fonda in the role of Willie Bauché, Hollywood producer-director-writer-actor and the most elaborate phony since the big bad wolf...
Fighting back, Fonda hires assassins, one of whom kills the other. He also fends off a blackmailer who wants enough money to live for three days like an American tourist. Thus the film alternates between unsuccessful farce and success-formula soap opera, but it never quite lives up to its pressagentry as "twists of tender pathos sublimated by laughter before the pathos can descend to bathos." The Man Who Understood Women is bathos cubed...