Word: films
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank is not up to the play. Perhaps he watered down the original impact to let sleeping animosities lie. But whatever his reasons for saccharine-coating the pill, (with tender smiles, violin music and so forth), Stevens turned out a slightly flabby film...
...beauty of Anne Frank's character dissolves into naughty cuteness, we are left with eight people who flirt, fight, and fret in a disappointingly usual way. The play managed, without ever seeming to strain, to suggest how sustained tension and continuous confinement would affect them, while the film injects these changes artificially...
Nabbing the stars, says Walter Bien, head of the commercials assembly line at Four Star Films, "involves a lot of personal ingenuity." Adds another commercial producer: "One time Bing will do it for nothing; another time he wouldn't do it for all the dough in the world." One of the lures is simple friendship: John Wayne agreed to the Gillette spiel because his longtime friend Dick Powell, a co-owner of Four Star, had promised Gillette some big names if it gave him the contract to film its commercials...
What follows would breed theatrical enchantment if the musical Destry had any of the human appeal of the 1939 Jimmy Stewart-Marlene Dietrich film. The current Destry is expense-account entertainment. The songs are brassy, the girls are all chassis, and the mood is about as prairiefied as a subway rush hour. The electrifying exceptions are Michael Kidd's imaginative dance sequences...
Love Is My Profession (Raoul J. Levy; Kingsley International) is easily the peep-showiest, cheap-thrillingest of all the Brigitte Bardot pictures-and probably the best. Topnotch Whodunit Writer Georges Simenon furnished the novel (En Cas de Malheur) on which the film is based. Jean Gabin was hired to top the title. Actress Bardot was signed to bring up the rear in the box-office battle. And the slickest of the big French directors, Claude Autant-Lara (Devil in the Flesh, Rouge et Noir), has contrived to combine all these expensive, volatile elements into a smutty story that is technically...