Word: heros
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...film's plot unfolds in the twin towns of Altenstadt and Neuburg, on either side of the Elbe, in the Soviet and American zones of Germany. One dramatic shot shows Russians and Americans meeting on the Elbe, with Russian guns grimly pointed westward. The hard-working Russian hero, Major Nikita Kuzmin, is a glaring contrast to the American Major James Hill, an amiable good-for-nothing who carries a bottle of Black & White Scotch in his hip pocket, and tries to involve his highminded Russian opposite number in "some kind of a little deal" on the black market...
...said, "but there are still so many black-market millionaires in Japan that honest people have lost the will to work." Chichibu doubts that Japan's slender resources can support her huge and growing population. An avid fan of Li'l Abner, the Prince wistfully recalled his hero's fabulous friend which, as a kind of one-animal Marshall Plan, had promised to provide humanity with an abundance of everything from eggs to suspender buttons (TIME, Dec. 27). "Even with American help," smiled Prince Chichibu, "the shmoos are quite needed in Japan...
Like the unfortunate hero in Dostoevsky's The Gambler, Miss Stanwyck is essentially a decent person consumed by a hopeless passion for pitting the probable against the possible. Her downfall begins during a brief visit to Las Vegas, where she meets a suave professional gambler (Stephen McNally) and takes her first innocent fling at roulette. While her journalist husband (Robert Preston) is busy on an assignment, she takes a few more flings. By this time Barbara is a goner. Eventually she loses a wrestling match with her moral scruples, gambles away the family savings, and runs off in shame...
...must have spent a long time learning to hit people and be hit, for he is never, as was Lardner's Midge, "stopped by a terrific slap on the forearm." The women in the movie are less convincing--the spectator is never more moved by them than is the hero, who shuttles from one to the next with singular unconcern. They aren't very important, anyway: once Kelly begins fighting, he is always a fighter and only sporadically a human being...
...probably as much at fault as anything. It also indulges in a handful of coincidences and cliches that weaken an otherwise tight structure. Perhaps the most difficult problem facing a critic of this movie is its basic black-and-white. journalistic character: you can't get involved because the hero doesn't draw sympathy. Director Mark Robson has shaded the film impersonally and perfectly. It is a tribute to his direction that the one strong emotion the audience feels is the desire to haul Midge Kelly up off the floor every time he gets knocked down. That is the strength...