Word: manne
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tired slogans into existential epigrams. This film, adapted freely from the drama, presents even more impressive credentials. It is directed by Vittorio De Sica. It stars, along with Fredric March and Robert Wagner, two 1961 Oscar winners: Sophia Loren and Maximilian Schell. And it is written by Abby Mann, who also carried off a 1961 Oscar for his script of Judgment at Nuremberg. But there will hardly be any such laurels for Altona. It is a ponderous, pretentious, interminable Germanic muddle of a movie, one of the year's noisier bombs...
What went wrong? The script. Scenarist Mann is a competent carpenter, and he has no trouble assembling the big blocks of Sartre's story. At war's end the sensitive son (Schell) of a German shipping magnate (March) shuts himself up in his father's attic and for 15 years pretends that his country lies in permanent ruins. To his crazy way of thinking, if defeat had not really meant destruction for his country, how then could he justify the killing he had done, the crimes he had committed to assure his country's survival...
...point is perhaps too fine, but Sartre presses it with French finesse. The film, to put it kindly, is less subtle. Scenarist Mann is a self-righteous and didactic young fellow who seems to feel that he has been personally appointed by Providence to sit in judgment on 80 million Germans. In Altona as in Nuremberg, his script is angry, preachy, shrill. It not only talks down. It is filled with the sort of teacher-knows-best truism ("It is better to face the truth no matter what the cost") that for reply invites a spitball...
...achieve the musical and personal rapport that such expressiveness requires, the players cultivate an emotional generosity toward one another that reminds them all of a good marriage. First Violinist Robert Mann, 43, and Violist Raphael Hillyer, 49, charter members of the quartet, are a perfect match for musicmaking-Mann the easy, natural leader, Hillyer the intense, nervous brooder. Second Violinist Isidore Cohen, 40, who joined in 1958, seldom speaks except when spoken to-a towering virtue in a second violinist -and Cellist Claus Adam, 45, is also an ideal man for his instrument-a calm, stable, reassuring anchorman...
...slum birth to slum school to bad education to low-paid job and parenthood of more slum children. The widely accepted premise is that the circle can and must be broken at the school stage. Equally important is that segregated neighborhood schools refute the original aim of Horace Mann's "common school," strengthening democracy by serving all races, creeds and classes. Integrationists believe that schools can help to heal U.S. race relations by returning to Mann's ideal...