Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Beach (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is a Hollywood vision of the end of the world. It is trumpeted as "the biggest story . . . The single most important film of our time." Last week it had a "Global Premiere," i.e., a simultaneous opening in 17 cities from Melbourne to Moscow. Alas, the version of the Nevil Shute chiller (TIME, Aug. 19, 1957) that Stanley (The Defiant Ones) Kramer has produced and directed turns out to be a sentimental sort of radiation romance, in which the customers are considerately spared any scenes of realistic horror, and are asked instead to accept the movie...
Aside from its sentimentality, the worst of the film's offenses is its unreality. Though Kramer & Co. predict that On the Beach will act "as a deterrent to further nuclear armaments," the picture actually manages for most of its length to make the most dangerous conceivable situation in human history seem rather silly and science-fictional. The players look half dead long before the fallout gets them. But what could any actors make of a script that imagines the world's end as a scene in which Ava Gardner stands and wistfully waves goodbye as Gregory Peck sails...
Black Orpheus (French). Director Marcel Camus (no kin to Novelist-Playwright Albert) has fashioned an impressive, poetic film from an adaptation of the Orpheus legend. The unknown Negro cast, the graceful transformation of the original, and the breathtaking image presented of life as a tropical carnival earned it the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes...
...Despite shortcomings, including a hero who is pretty much an overgrown boy scout, Director William Wyler's $15 million film version of Major General Lew Wallace's Biblical bestseller (1880) is the most expensive and the best screen spectacle ever produced...
Pillow Talk. A songwriting satyr (Rock Hudson) and an interior decorator (Doris Day) share a party line-and more-in this flashy film. But Comic Tony Randall comes off with the pillow's best feathers...