Word: flashback
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...innuendoes loose the first of the novel's rockslides of revelation. On the very day of his first wife's death, this pillar of respectability, this devotee of reason, Arthur Winner, had embarked on an adulterous affair with Marjorie Penrose, wife of his crippled friend. In flashback ignominy, Winner relives their mute animal couplings, the gross infidelity of "two cheap sneaks." With this recollection the ordeal of Arthur Winner has begun...
Director Moore has only been effective in creating theatrically seperate and scattered scenes which in no way hold together. He uses good and tried techniques, such as the flashback and the symbol, but he incredibly misuses them. Daniel Gelin struggles with some artistry to maintain the sympathy and interest of the audience in his Jekyll and Hyde sort of role, and at times he is almost successful. Marie Monsart is fittingly tender and beautiful as his one true love...
...curse, original sin. Such a theme would be no novelty from François Mauriac or Graham Greene, but it is surprising when it comes from an existentially-minded French intellectual. As a novelist, Camus dissipates his shock effect by telling his story in a long-winded flashback. As a thinker, he remains as provocative, and to many of his French fellow intellectuals as annoying, as an alarm clock going off in the middle of the night...
This collection of oddballs is wryly amusing as well as highly implausible. There is no plot, and the characters impinge on each other as temperaments rather than as people. All the action is in flashback, and the key act is a long-ago kiss stolen by the playwright from the virginal mother of three, a kiss that somehow set in motion for the woman and her future husband and children that secret civil war between Puritanism and passion, a war of the blood more openly and obviously dramatized by Author Morris in the spectacle of bloodless Americans watching the bloodfest...
While the acting is above reproach, the photography and background music add little when they are not distracting. The technical qualities of the film are not helped by splices and cuts. The flashback technique is effective, although the point of view is not maintained faithfully throughout. The film is most effective in the intimate scenes when the internal conflict of Hugo can be felt most dramatically. As such moments comprise the better part of the film, Dirty Hands is powerful not only as an insight into Communism, but also as a drama of an individual searching for himself...