Word: marta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bestseller, is Moviemaker Zanuck's first lone-wolf production since he left Fox. This turbid plot-boiler clearly rates a special award as the sexiest West Indian travelogue ever made. The mating season is always in full swing on the throbbing Caribbean isle of Santa Marta, which doubtless boasts the highest imaginary birth rate of any 50-mile-long island under the sun. Island employs even the unsubtle cinema device of the screen-bottom exit, pointed up with gasps and romantic rustlings after its clinching couples drop from view...
...disjointed welter of plots occasionally departs from animal husbandry to dwell upon balmy Santa Marta's social and racial ferments. It seems that the happy islanders, almost all of some Negro ancestry, sometimes get irritated by the snootiness of the British colonial plantation owners. Their self-seeking messiah (played like a talking totem pole by Singer Harry Belafonte) is trying to improve their lot by shaking hands with all of them, sullenly muttering into his champagne at white folks' garden parties, making louder speeches over coconut milk about his dedication to equality and self-government. Belafonte...
...does have Negro blood, imagines that he is also a cuckold, and so murders his supposed rival in a fit of pique. The movie's single solid acting job is by John Williams as a shrewd constabulary chief. The movie gets no distance at all in solving Santa Marta's color problem, but the color photography is beautiful...
...urgency and dedication of her appeal took the city by storm. Newspapers named her the "Fiancée of Death" and called her story the "Second Song of Bernadete." President Café Filho made a personal visit to promise the government's "moral and material support." And Marta Rocha, runner-up in the 1954 Miss Universe contest and honored symbol of Brazilian beauty, went to see the dark-haired girl, wept, and next day broadcast an appeal for funds to build the "Hospital of Bernadete" for care of cancer victims...
...hospital fund mounted quickly to $103,600 by week's end and gave every promise of growing, as Rio's Jockey Club promised to donate all profits from a Sunday's racing, and Marta Rocha announced plans for a star-studded charity show. Meanwhile, as Bernadete's plight drew national attention, Brazilian Specialist Albert Coutinho offered to perform a drastic, last-chance operation involving removal of the right lung. Bernadete decided against it. "My death," she said, "will be more useful than my life. People will not forget...