Word: manne
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Staying the Course. It was then up to Director Daniel Mann (Butterfield 8, The Rose Tattoo) to put the rats through their dramatic paces. He may well go down in cinematic history as the Cecil B. DeMille of rodent movies: the rats swarm through Willard as if they were born to stardom. There was one problem, though: getting enough rat shrieks for the sound track. With a watchful fellow from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in daily attendance, the sound men had to be crafty. One day, when the A.S.P.C.A. man was not looking, they...
...exactly the sort of thing that Willard sorely lacks. It is a movie with a good idea-a young man who uses rats to avenge the oppressions of his elders-but it would have needed a combination of Bunuel and Hitchcock to carry it off. Instead it has Daniel Mann (I'll Cry Tomorrow), who manages, despite a good performance by Bruce Davison, to make the movie look like something disinterred from the cellar of TV's Twilight Zone...
Most important, Mann's treatment of the unconsummated affair of man and boy was a metaphor for Europe's decaying society. But Visconti takes the veneer and calls it furniture. With infinite tedium, he pores over every facet of Tadzio's Botticelli visage; with stupid distortion, he makes the boy, played by Bjorn Andresen, a flirt whose eyes flash a come-on to his helpless elder, like some midnight cowboy off the Via Veneto. He even concocts an elaborate bordello scene in which Aschenbach is shown as a heterosexual failure-a moment that proves as barren...
This film is worse than mediocre; it is corrupt and distorted. It is one thing to change an author's lines or his characters. It is quite another to destroy his soul. Mann's Death in Venice is, in fact, no more about homosexuality than Kafka's The Metamorphosis is about entomology. Visconti's poshlost may aspire to tragedy, but it does not even achieve melancholia; it is irredeemably, unforgivably...
...beaver's teeth pronged into a cigar." Skouras is merely an "oxlike package, voice like a child's rattle." Louella Parsons is kissed off as "The Queen Mother at Toad Hall." Marilyn Monroe, "a child with short legs and a fat bottom," wonders innocently: "Who is Thomas Mann...