Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...would be impossible anywhere but on television. For one thing, each show is stitched together from about 350 snippets of video tape. Some of them-a flash of graffiti, for example, or a mugging face-last only an eighth of a second. Executive Producer George Schlatter calls this "energy film," a technique that gives a kind of booster burst of speed to the show. Explains Dick Martin: "Nobody's going to appreciate everything on our show. But if one gag goes completely over your head, there'll be another along in a few seconds that cracks...
Instead of simply duplicating the first-folio on film, Zeffirelli and his two co-writers, Franco Brusati and Masolino d'Amico, have blithely excised and elided speeches, transposed lines, eliminated characters. It is a dangerous game, rewriting Shakespeare, but Romeo and Juliet proves that it can be played and won. An even greater risk was to give the leading roles to a pair of youthful unknowns with virtually no acting experience: Juliet is a tremulous 16-year-old, Olivia Hussey; Romeo is Leonard Whiting, 17. Both look their parts and read their lines with a sensitivity far beyond...
...something of a stunt when British TV Director Philip Saville went to Denmark's Elsinore Castle to make a television Hamlet, starring Christopher Plummer. Going to Greece to film Oedipus the King in an ancient amphitheater is also a gimmick, but it has paid off better. The stones of the theater at Dodona and the sere Greek hills behind them grandly evoke the atmosphere in which Sophocles himself saw his great tragedy performed. The local peasant faces among the extras give an authenticity to the hoi polloi that makeup men could never have managed...
...necessary to remind oneself these days that Tennyson wrote those lines with a straight face. For the poet laureate, the gallant but futile attack at Balaclava was a testimony to human courage. Aided by the hindsight of history, Director Tony Richardson sees the event in another light. His film version of The Charge of the Light Brigade, based in part on Cecil Woodham-Smith's brilliant study, The Reason Why, is a polemical attack on the futility of war and the fallout of greed, blunder and carnage that follows...
...story could have been transmuted into a film of coruscating irony. Instead, Richardson has chosen to subordinate the drama to an illustrated primer on sociology. With facile juxtapositions, he shuttles between the airless, reeking slums and the sunlit gardens of the Victorian aristocracy. The bloody flogging of a sergeant is contrasted with the gleaming comfort of an officers' mess. Richardson sporadically punctuates the action with animated cartoons of the Russian bear and the British lion ruffling the feathers of the Turkish turkey. The animations, done in the style of period Punch cartoons, are wittily rendered by Richard Williams...