Word: hollywoodized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PROFESSIONAL film critics and motion picture moguls have long proclaimed the death of the Big Hollywood movie. Grand spectacles like Intolerance, Ben Hur, War and Peace and Cleopatra are said to be relics of another era that has ended because of changed audience tastes and a lack of money in the large studios. But each year there are new examples of the staying-power and constant appeal of such pictures. Nicholas and Alexandra proves that the public hasn't tired of gazing humbly at larger-than-life historical personalities on the big silver screen...
Luckily however, Nicholas and Alexandra has more going for it than just a generous budget. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, a man who is usually in solid control of his cameras and last year guided Patton to a virtual sweep of the Academy Awards (Hollywood likes to reward success). It also concerns a subject and a period that fascinates Americans: the Russian Revolution. Almost everyone west of Berlin shares various illusions about the nature of the Russian people, if only because Russia has always deliberately shielded itself from foreign scrutiny. The average American is eager to view...
...course, times have changed, and since then Hollywood has grown up, depicting a crueler world of vice, not wickedness, and mediocrity, not evil. But when I delved back further, into the twenties and thirties, I found vice and evil too. Suddenly I discovered that adults had always been adults, and that the hidden meanings I now discovered in the forties concoctions had always been there. The world had been sophisticated before I grew up to appreciate...
...actress either. The film belongs entirely to director Ken Russell, who has her appear leg first--sporting an enormous white cast with two red-painted toenails peeping forth. In the space of two minutes he makes her suggest the entire run of has-been stars from the first Hollywood queen ceding to the second, to Bette Davis watching Anne Baxter's rise at the other end of the see-saw in All About Eve. Russell takes several such characters and manages to make them represent more than they could ever possibly be, which accounts for the exceeding richness of this...
They're all there: the lucky understudy, the reunited father and son, the aging star, the play within a play convention, the color, the team spirit, and True Love. Added to these is Mr. DeThrill, a Hollywood tycoon who for some unknown reason decides to attend a matinee in this particularly tacky town somewhere in the sticks of Britain. A new Busby Berkeley who sees in color instead of black and white, he imagines everything as it might appear on the Big Screen. Suddenly the confines of a stage are forgotten. His multiple vision transforms each girl into a bevy...