Word: lumet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...surface. The flashback sequence at the beginning is pared to the bone; blue filters and slow motion make it into a ballet of form, a non-human prelude to a film that for the rest of its length is nothing but people talking at each other. Next Lumet shows us his cast assembling from all over the world to board the Orient Express at Istanbul. There's the involuntary shudder of pleasure when you recognize a regal Vanessa Redgrave sailing through a crowd of Turkish peddlers, as Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset airily overturn a huge cart of oranges...
OTHER BLUNDERS, though, may be credited to Lumet. The disclosure scene is bungled by being to flatly spelled-out; the flashbacks are too insistent, show too much. Everything is reduced to a simple formula; each murderer gets his motive neatly assigned to him. The energy is lost that should be generated in any room containing John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman et al. Lumet doesn't seem to realize that such energy won't generate itself, that he has to do something to make it happen. The pace of his film is slow, so slow at the beginning that...
Directed by SIDNEY LUMET Screenplay by PAUL DEHN...
There are only two ways to mount a project like this: for gilded fun, which is fair enough, or for serious suspense, which is perilous, considering the mechanics of the plot. Director Sidney Lumet tries to avoid the problem in typical fashion-by getting around it. He tries to make the pasteboard characterizations more winning, if hardly more real, by casting luminaries in the roles...
...ultimately boring mode is half-expressed rue leavened by quaint down-home turns of phrase. In attempting to cover four decades in an hour and a half, the story uses an enormous amount of voice-over narration. The device does not exactly enhance our involvement with the film. Director Lumet, venturing for the first time into Western territory, betrays the dude's classic enchantment with large vistas...