Word: hunters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...preponderance of people in the theatre, both here and elsewhere, can be observed regularly discussing movies, or discussing their own work in terms of the cinema. At Harvard, the success of the Carpenter Center has both reflected and stimulated a generally increased awareness of film work. And now Timothy Hunter, the energetic president of Ivy Films has accomplished the quite remarkable feat of producing the first feature-length motion picture by an undergraduate in 18 years: a good silent movie called Sinister Madonna...
...Hunter's story is based loosely on a novel by Sax Rohmer, the creator of the formidable Fu Manchu. Fu, you may recall if your youth was as misspent as mine, was a satanic supermind who ran a terrorist organization called the Si Fan, "to which fully one-third of the world's colored races belong," and while he never quite achieved the complete global domination he so earnestly sought, Fu Manchu sure came close as dammit on a number of occasions...
...himself has been cut from this movie, and his sometime antagonist, steely-eyed Sir Denis Nayland Smith, reduced to an Adams House sophomore with identity hang-ups, but it is to Hunter's glory that something of the spirit of the Asiatic fiend lingers...
...Hunter's camera creates characterizations with considerable skill. Lerner, who has the lean chops and darting eyes of a nouvelle vague flesh peddlar, is obviously claustrophobic beneath the heavy angles and oppressive ceilings of Adams House. But outside his own room, he pays for a heightened freedom of movement with his inability to be at ease or in scale against alien objects or in alien environments. He's lost, often quite literally, insuch differing surroundings as a mortuary-like IAB shower room and the lush mechanical complexity of the Loeb shop...
...slap across the cheeks to be sure it's really dead. In the film's most immediately powerful sequence, he spells out his self-disgust by carving "FOOL" in his forearm with a razorblade. The scene is beautifully shot with relentlessly detached clinicism that is almost unbearable. In Lerner, Hunter has faithfully recorded the conventions of the French/American tough guy: his slovenlieness, his resistance, his attempt to be sphynxlike. But in the character's most Bogartian moment, a curl of the lip at an actor who is strutting out a characterization in front of the mirror in the Loeb green...