Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Doughnuts & Nibbles. And so it went: a baritone-soprano duo, a dramatic monologue by a man who told the stirring story of a 41-year-old doughnut, a book reviewer, a man showing a travel film on Texas. Biggest hit: an obviously talented 17-year-old Korean pianist named Tong II Han, whose fluid performance of Scarlatti and Chopin sent the audience into a dither...
Embezzled Heaven (Rhombus-Film; Louis de Rochemont) is a reasonably loyal German adaptation, dubbed in English, of the 1940 bestseller in which Franz (The Song of Bernadette) Werfel proposed a parable of modern man's fatal confusion, as he saw it, of the material and the spiritual worlds. The heroine is a dim-witted old peasant woman (Annie Rosar), who works as a cook in a wealthy Austrian family, saves all her pennies to educate her nephew (Kurt Meisel) for the priesthood. Actually the cook does not care a fig for the nephew. All she wants is a priest...
...film has its moving moments. The confrontation scene with the revolting young nephew has a slimy authenticity, and the cook's death is both sentimental and heartrending. The tour of Rome is fairly exciting, and some eye-filling episodes (Agfacolor) have been recorded in the Vatican. The main trouble with the picture: a bad screenplay that requires 14 actors, provides only two real parts...
Imitation of Life (Universal-International), after a quarter century in Hollywood's root cellar (the first film version of this Fannie Hurst bestseller was released in 1934), is still a potent onion. When passed before the moviegoer's eyes, it may force theater owners to install aisle scuppers to drain off the tears...
...Diary of Anne Frank. Tighter than the book, more fluid than the play, a film masterpiece about the 13-year-old German Jewish girl who survived two years of hiding in occupied Holland, but who survived a concentration camp only in her diary. With Newcomer Millie Perkins, brillantly directed by George Stevens...