Word: kernel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Strangers' occasional virtuosity cannot conceal its flaws. As a Cuban Gestapo man, Pedro (The Pearl) Armendariz gives a fine performance. But when he starts making bestial passes at Jennifer Jones while Garfield hides in the cellar, he is only one jump ahead of old-fashioned horse opera. Another kernel of corn: Garfield's big death scene, highlighted by Gilbert Roland's brokenhearted requiem in calypso rhythm and some highfalutin dialogue delivered by Miss Jones. Never for a moment a dull movie, Strangers is often too facile or too far away from strict artistic honesty. Coming from...
...Strasbourg, he has lived largely in Switzerland, Germany and France, was visiting Manhattan for the first time last week. A cultivated and witty talker, he seized on a bowl of popcorn to illustrate his working methods to reporters. "I begin with something like this," he explained, delicately selecting a kernel and gazing at it through tortoise-shell glasses. "I see just what expression it takes and develop that. Now this little bump here looks like a branch. Turn it around and we have a head, or a flower. But I don't want a head, a branch...
...Kernel of Greatness. Today, at 64, Flaherty reaps the rewards of a pioneer who has never stopped pioneering. Before Nanook, factual films were mostly travelogues-patronizing glimpses of exotic peoples in far-off places. Flaherty concentrated on the struggles of man against his environment. Because of his choice of settings and subjects (Moana, in the South Seas; Man of Aran, on a remote island off the coast of Ireland; Elephant Boy, in India), he was sometimes attacked as a romanticist. The "realists" who belabored him later discovered that much of their own "realism" was merely a fad; Flaherty...
Years ago Flaherty said: "I try to make my films a revelation of a country, and of the people who live in it ... There is a kernel of greatness in all peoples . . . it is up to the film maker to find the one incident, or even the one movement that makes it clear...
...glean the few stray wheat stalks left in the stubble of a wheatfield. They grind the grain by hand and make a sort of bread. Some, unable to wait, were eagerly breaking the stalk heads open and eating as they gleaned. It left a grayish paste of kernel shell around their lips...