Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...failed to be stirring largely because Laurence Harvey as Henry, given some of Shakespeare's best writing for trumpet, could not make the climaxes. (When asked if Harvey had a cold, someone who ought to know said, "No, he's a film actor.") And his clipped, fastidious diction sounds like a mannerism picked up from overindulgence in Restoration comedy...
...representative sequence is Cabiria in the vaudeville house. In the middle of a realistic film, this peculiar fantasy scene stands out memorably. She is inveigled onto the stage by a top-hatted hypnotist who is the devil; she is put in a trance. With a wreath of paper flowers in her hair she is made to dream that she is about to enter into chaste matrimony with a handsome prince. Her face is transformed from a bedraggled chippie's to an incarnation of Hawthorne's Hilda. Then the devil snaps his fingers, house lights come up, and she awakens...
...church. They have built a bridge and spur road to short-cut the trip to the Paraná River, are starting another school, a separate church, and several more frame houses for the Colaborer families soon to follow. They hold Sunday and evening services for hundreds of Brazilians, show film strips, pass out Portuguese-language Bibles and prayer books. George Sutton, 35, has trimmed off 35 lbs., put calluses on his hands lugging buckets of water. His wife, 34, misses lipstick ("but, after all, we don't want to look like painted women") and yearns for un-Brazilian slacks...
Nonetheless, this modest, seldom brilliant, sometimes even repulsively cute film version of the play, made in England by Anthony (The Browning Version) Asquith, is a pertly entertaining piece of photographed theater. With the bland commercial irreverence that Shaw admired in himself but loathed in his producers, Director Asquith has cast Shaw's pearls of wit among some of the biggest camera hogs in the business. Robert Morley and Alastair Sim bear small resemblance to the characters Shaw had in mind, but in company with John Robinson and Felix Aylmer they make a ludicrously Aristophanic chorus of sawbones...
...second novel (TIME, Jan. 13, 1958), was a 1,266-page description of almost continuous sexual activity, climaxed with frequent and flagrant violations of the English language. But the book at least had the distinction of being the biggest (2 lbs. 11 oz.) literary clinker of the year. The film, perhaps because it has necessarily been sterilized by the censor, is not nearly so successful. In the last twelve months there have been at least two major movies (The Vikings and A Farewell to Arms) that were even more absurdly awful...