Word: foremans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plot is as thin as a very thin slice of salami (which could easily have been a line in this play). David Kolowitz, though working at Mr. Foreman's machine shop wants to be an actor. His friend Marvin shows him an ad for actors in the New York Post and David quits work early to head for the illegitimate theatre. There he is stunned by the leading lady's asset, her body, but not so completely that he doesn't come back in the end to his girl-friend Wanda, nor enroll in pharamacy school as his parents have...
...Hollywood. He has now finished playing a drifter in a forthcoming TV episode in hopes that his grandpap's talents were hereditary. At least some of them seem to be, because "Hick" is already a pretty fair rider and roper, used to do it for a living as foreman on his father's Laredo ranch. "Back home in Texas, I made $5 a day," he says. "But here I make $250." So he figures he'll try acting for a while. "If I don't make it," he shrugs, "I can always find something...
Avoiding battle scenes, Foreman cannily keeps the war warmish in a series of boy-meets-girl episodes that put the Army into the fray with some of Europe's lushest beauties. One soldier corrupts a trim Belgian violinist, Romy Schneider. Vince Edwards meets Rosanna Schiaffino. Eli Wallach, as a tough sergeant, sweats out an air raid abed with Jeanne Moreau. Hamilton pairs off with Elke Sommer, a free-living German girl whose parents approve of her enterprise. Peppard finds respite with Melina Mercouri, a black market wheeler-dealer. None can compare to the girl next door, of course...
Meanwhile, to keep his chronology straight, Foreman inserts newsreel footage from back home: the Rockettes try out an obstacle course; Shirley Temple marries John Agar; Bess Truman launches a flying ambulance. Cutting back to the action makes for a staccato "new cinema" pace-and for irony, tons and tons of it. Foreman likes his irony set to music. While troop trucks slog through snow, he cuts to a slide announcing: THE MANAGEMENT OF THIS THEATER WISHES EVERYBODY A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR 1945. EVERYBODY SING! Later, there is mawkish sentiment when some gentle British folk invite Peppard...
Shaped by discipline, such boldness might have made a classic indictment of war. Instead, Foreman has spent two and a half years producing a faintly vulgar medley nearly three hours long. Even the film's finest scene is marred by excess: as a pathetically boyish American deserter is led before a firing squad in a vast snowy field, the sound track erupts with Frank Sinatra's dulcet warbling of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, followed by Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. The choice seems arbitrary, a victory cheaply won. Or does an audience really have...