Word: flashback
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...superb British films now revived at the Kenmore, though entirely different in subject matter, are amazingly similar in form and background. Both are told mainly by the method of flashback, one from the psychiatrist's couch and the other from a drawing-room reverie. Both have a musical accompaniment of late Romantic period music which is always insistent and always heavy...
...only blemish on the whole job is the slight confusion created by the first flashback within a flashback. This, however, detracts little from an otherwise top-rate film...
...stage production, for instance, was a monologue in which Amanda Wingfield, a demolished southern belle, recalls her past. It was poignant because the belle was so far from her romantic youth. The picture, however, in order to avoid focusing on one face for several minutes, adds a flashback to the monologue; the belle's past becomes much closer and more real than it should...
...flashback, Fairbanks visits Vosnia to pick up a medal for a new operating technique and to demonstrate the surgery. He discovers in mid-operation that, through a switch in patients, he is working on the innards of General Niva, the country's dictator. The operation goes well. Later, over billiards, Villain Hawkins explains just why the general's survival-or at least the illusion of it-is politically urgent at the moment. If the dictator dies, the surgeon's knowledge of the fact would make his liquidation imperative...
Apart from the changed format and the tampered ending, the movie suffers a letdown in British Actress Gertrude Lawrence's performance. She does a competent job, marred by some confusion of accents, and her versatility enables her to flit coquettishly through a soft-focus flashback recounting the fancied conquests of her youth. Yet she never gives the role the emotional tug or the full measure of addled humor that it had in the hands of the stage's late great Laurette Taylor...