Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...take this production on its own terms, you've first of all got to disabuse yourself of the notion that you're watching a film. You may be looking at a screen, but what you're seeing is the stage production done by the Shakepearian Festival Players in Stratford, Ontario, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie. Otherwise, the narrow confines of the stage, the incessant shouting of the actors, and the occasionally excessive posturing needed to impress the last rows of the balcony, will prove annoying. If you want to, it's also easy to laugh at the formal gestures...
...similarity to Christian sacrament won't carry you to the core of Oedipus, either, for Sophocles' drama is above all else a pagan rite of purification. It is a religious outlook worthy of general reconsideration, and the present film will show you not only what the Athenians saw on stage twenty-five centuries ago but what they saw in the world and the cosmos as well. The masks of the actors bear a bizarre and wholly appropriate resemblance to the grotesque faces of the magnified reptiles and insects seen in the Brattle's introductory short subject. Tanya Moiseiwitsch has provided...
...barrens beyond the Hill of the Demons in the French Cameroons. The demons did not appear personally, but the place was hell, all right. By day the temperature stood as high as 140°, at night it never sank below 90°. Work was impossible after noon, and the film had to be stored in cracked ice. On top of the heat there were insects, malaria, dysentery. By the third day, cast and crew were dropping like flies. In 4½ months of shooting, 30 doctors handled 960 sick calls. Eddie Albert had sunstroke and spent several days in delirium...
These statements, which contain the essential message of the film, have poetic light and spiritual resonance, but they read better than they sound from the screen. Despite intelligent acting by Actor Howard, skillful touches from Director Huston and some awesome landscapes with elephants, this huge (2 hrs. 11 mins.) movie finally seems no more than a literary notion that has apparently suffered, along with CinemaScope and DeLuxe color, a severe attack of elephantiasis...
...Case of Dr. Laurent (French). A baby is born on-camera in the final scene, but far earlier than that, Jean Gabin, as a kindly rural doctor, and Nicole Courcel, as his first natural-childbirth convert, have given the film warm, memorable appeal...