Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...real star of the film is a great deal of imposing scenery and the process in which it is filmed. Todd-AO uses a large curved screen which, however, has a less awkward shape than that used in Cinemascope. The great advantage of the process is that objects in the background are every bit as clear and in focus as those near the camera. It is far the most impressive of the recent proliferation of movie gadgets, and alone is nearly worth the Saxon Theater's outrageous prices...
...Snow Was Black is another esoteric and macabre film from the French flick factories that seeks to demonstrate the effects of depravity and loss of hope. Artfully acted, it remains profoundly unconvincing in motivation, without a sense of unity, and almost cheap in exploitation of shock sequences...
...when he was a child so destroyed his values and trust in the world that he finds it necessary to stab people for entertainment to kill an old woman who had been kind to him in childhood, and in what seems to be the central scene of the film, exposes a sweet and innocent girl whom he loves and who loves him, lying prostrate and expectant, to another man. After this follows a long stream of almost ridiculous anti-climatical incidents of violence and betrayal in a Kafkaesque sort of prison. And in the end, he finds happiness...
Adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, the film seems to use these more than sordid elements, not because it has a point of view, even a negativistic one, but because sex and brutality are shortcuts to suspense and audience attention. The proof of this lack of unity and pointfulness is that the aforementioned seduction scene is the climax of the film, after which it anti-climatically and ridiculously gurgles along and finally stops...
...credit to the excellent acting of the principals that the film can almost make one believe for a moment that being the son of a whore is enough dramatic justification for a berserk attempt to envelop all that evil has to offer. After a while the surfeit of violence and shock destroy even the dramatic incipient in them and become almost humorous...