Word: garfein
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...easy to understand the relief it would give a reviewer to be able to pin some sort of label on the film. The director, Jack Garfein, and the scriptwriter, Calder Willingham--who reworked his own 1947 novel and his 1953 Broadway play, both called End As a Man-- appear infuriatingly unwilling to commit themselves about what they are doing. All that can be said with complete confidence is that, in a style which captures much of the spontaneity of a really first-rate documentary, they present a story which centers on the career of one Jocko De Paris, a cadet...
...Garfein and Willingham present only the bare facts of the story and refuse to construct any sort of frame of reference which would help in interpreting it. While a pure thriller in many ways, the film cries out for interpretation. This necessity, however, does not in any way detract from the quality of the picture, but in fact adds an extra dimension to its interest. If I may still be permitted to voice a bit of sociological jargon of my own, the story of De Paris seems at bottom to represent the conflict between a very tightly organized society...
Whatever may be its "meaning," The Strange One is unquestionably something of a technical achievement. Garfein's direction is brilliant. With an acute sense of timing, he carefully constructs each scene to extract the greatest possible amount of tension from it; and although this is his first motion picture, his camera work, which makes extensive use of probing close-up shots, is that of an expert. Equally accomplished is the acting of Ben Gazzara, who in his first film makes De Paris into an intense and haunting, if not exactly lovable, figure...
...whiff of the shower-room sociology that permeated the book. He does learn a bit about what goes on inside a sadist-mostly, in this case, repressed homosexuality. Most of all, he gets a handsome introduction to two of Hollywood's most promising young men: Director Jack Garfein, 26, and Actor Ben Gazzara, 26, two products of Manhattan's Actors' Studio, who make their film debut with this picture. Garfein has directed the film more deftly than he staged the play on Broadway; he shows an impressive sense of story structure and scene timing, but rather less...
Doubting that I'd get close to her again, I looked around for her crew, and soon discovered a talkative little lady of about 40, from Warner Brothers, who told me to my dismay that Carroll Baker is really Mrs. Jack Garfein, the mother of a bouncing baby daughter...