Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...perhaps quibbling to pick at "Tragic Hunt" in the face of our Hollywood output: it is only the recent Italian standard of excellence that justifies this. At any rate, it shouldn't be missed by the connoisseur...
...play's central figure is Charlie Castle (John Garfield), onetime idealist and now such a whopping movie star that he is being asked to sign a 14-year contract. Fed up, Charlie wants to leave Hollywood; his wife (Nancy Kelly) is so fed up she has left him. But Charlie is being blackmailed by his bosses. A while back he had run over and killed a child, and he had been saved from prison by the studio's wiliest finagling. Now, when he balks, the studio threatens jail. Later, when things get messier, the studio doesn...
...Odets' rage and revulsions are wasted: some of his Hollywood villains-including a cynical hatchetman and a ruthless cinemagnate (well played by Paul Mc-Grath and J. Edward Bromberg) are vividly caught or caricatured. Now & then, along with some "poetic" writing that is as unpleasantly conspicuous as a nose ring, a lively crack comes forth. But most of The Big Knife is as unfocused as it is violent; it is full of curses not deep but loud, of intemperate and untidy theatrics. And Castle's particular predicament is far too unusual to mean anything. He is surely...
When film production lags, most cine-moguls chew their fingernails. But while Producer David O. Selznick is killing time, he makes a tidy profit with a sideline which Hollywood calls flesh-peddling. Unlike an actors' agent, whose commission is fixed at 10%, Selznick gets fat loan-out fees for the stars who are under contract to him as a producer. Because he is Hollywood's shrewdest publicizer of talent, his stars are in great demand. His profit is the fees, minus the salaries he would be paying the players anyhow...
Mother Is a Freshman (20th Century-Fox) is a featherbrained variation on one of Hollywood's most cherished myths: that U.S. Moms up to the age of 40 should be able, at the drop of a mink stole, to look and act like their teen-age daughters. The plot, as silly as a schoolgirl's endorsement of a beauty soap, is just about as inventive...