Word: hacks
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...styles produced an improvement in quality. Better directors and writers were drawn to spy movies once they stopped being farcical exursions into the world of Ian Fleming. Michael Anderson directed and Harold Pinter wrote The Quiller Memorandum, easily the best of the lot. But more recently the Bond hacks have begun to get their hands in to the new field. Guy Hamilton, a hack if ever there was one, has directed Funeral in Berlin, a clumsy, convoluted, illegitimate offspring of The Ipcress File in which agent Harry Palmer, again played by Michael Caine, proves a powerful bore. The direction...
John Frankenheimer is a hack, an ex-television director obviously more comfortable composing shots within squares than he is filling rectangles. Unable to compose good shots, he frequently employs a split-screen technique, puttting two or more different images on the screen simultaneously, separated by black dividing lines. This enables him to avoid the challenge of coming to grips with Super Panavision. Unable to put shots together with any art or precision, he resorts to tricks; Grand Prix is filled with multiple image shots and dream shots done with prisms. His over-all use of trick photography is never relevant...
...curdle the hollandaise, lump the simple white sauce, hack away at that suckling pig . . . we'll take Julia and her savory shortcomings...
...Free Democrats intend to hack away at the joints where basic Christian Democratic-Socialist differences have been papered over in favor of the coalition, and to concentrate their attack on any signs of political difference. Differences there are sure to be. The two parties of the coalition are still far enough apart to provide considerable checks and balances on each other's actions...
...shops of Harlem whip out their trusty Geiger counter and go lickety-click from Teheran to Geneva to Naples to Nice. En route they run a grim gauntlet of all-too-familiar thriller scenes (bang-bang on the Blue Train, hugger-mugger on the bad guy's yacht, hack-the-stripper in a nudie nightspot) and unpleasantly overripe chestnuts ("How'll we get there-take the midnight camel?"). By the time the heroes get the heroin the customers may find themselves in something of a narcoma. The very best that can be said about this picture is that...