Word: litvak
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Adapted by Scripter Peter Viertel from George Howe's Christopher Award-winning 1949 novel, Call It Treason, the. picture is a bang-up job of moviemaking. To tell the story of German prisoners of war who worked as U.S. spies, Director Anatole (The Snake Pit) Litvak goes the semi-documentary technique one better: he uses locations in 16 German cities and towns not merely as backgrounds but as living sets to re-enact the chaos of a battered, squalid Germany in the critical winter of 1945. The canvas is broad, the detail meticulous, the effect overwhelmingly real...
When Hollywood's Producer-Director Anatole Litvak and Producer Darryl Zanuck gambled on filming The Snake Pit (TIME, Dec. 20), they knew that it might never be shown in Britain-a risk that could make the difference between profit and loss. They took the long shot that the movie would get by the British censorship ban on scenes within insane asylums. Last week, the gamble began...
...most part, the adapters have admirably preserved the painful mood, the wry humor and the shock value of the book. Producer-Director Litvak has drawn from their script a picture which is, in many ways, better than the novel...
...Director. Producer-Director Litvak, a strong believer in psychoanalysis, tells his story with great simplicity and sympathy. There are times when the simplicity verges on the obvious. But his best scenes are superb. The finest, based mostly on Litvak's observations in the asylums he visited, is laid in the "disturbed" ward. There, amid the weirdly unrestrained babble, the camera makes its way from figure to figure: the girl who slinkily dances about in a pathetic imitation of an evening gown, the woman crouched praying on the floor, the girl with the Ana Pauker haircut pleading "in the name...
...Colonel Anatole Litvak's furious, emotionally pulverizing The Battle of Russia...