Word: gilliat
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Gilbert & Sullivan (London Films, Lopert) is a thoroughgoing stomp through the old Savoy. Though it is well known that one Gilbert & Sullivan opera is more than most companies can produce successfully, the British team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (State Secret) have undertaken to produce almost all of them-and all at once, in this two-hour film-and to tell the life stories of Gilbert & Sullivan at the same time...
Scarcely a petal of each play is preserved-an air of one, a snatch of another -but the writers of the script (Gilliat worked with Leslie Baily, whose Gilbert & Sullivan Book was a 1952 bestseller) have deftly wired them all together to make a charming, if slightly artificial musical forget-me-not. Some of the charm is due to the spirited stuffiness of the Victorian settings and the muted Technicolor. Best of all, several members of the famed D'Oyly Carte company (Martyn Green, Thomas Round, Gron Davies) give silken-fine performances...
...State Street" could have been terribly overdone, but Director-producer Sidney Gilliat molds it into a tense and believable story. He begins with Marlowe about to be shot, and then uses flashbacks. This sets up a feeling of hopelessness at the outset which is maintained almost until...
...eight British films turned out since 1945 under their Individual Pictures trademark, plump, chipper Sidney Gilliat, 42, and quiet, precise Frank Launder, 43, have not yet been caught with a dud. Why do their pictures always make a tidy profit? Launder, a onetime repertory actor, and Gilliat, who thought he would be a journalist, point significantly to the fact that they have always been able to make pictures without too much front-office bossing...
Last week, sponsored by Sir Alexander Korda, who finances and distributes their product and gives them a cut in the profits, Launder & Gilliat were making the most of their independence. While Launder worked on a film called Beauty Queen (about "the kind of a girl who starts in the News of the World and ends up there, too"), Gilliat was mulling over a movie biography of Gilbert & Sullivan...