Word: maunder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Colonel George Armstrong Custer (Wayne Maunder) is the hero of this new hoss-sol-diers-and-Injuns adventure. Premiere...
...believable as a Lancashire bloke of almost invincible rectitude. For 39 years he has been a virgin, and that is the crux of this lacklusty comedy adapted from a London and Broadway play. The boob and the bawd (Diane Cilento, the gamekeeper's daughter of Tom Jones) meet, maunder, tell one another pathetic little lies, and slowly uncover their loneliness...
There are, of course, a few anachronisms. The Jim Crow humor, acceptable to most audiences in 1939, will embarrass the average moviegoer today. And there are flaws of style and structure. The second half of the picture tends to maunder a little, and the whole film is afflicted by Producer David Selznick's rather tacky preference for gnarled trees silhouetted against flaming sunsets. The spectator sometimes gets a peculiar sensation that the picture has not really begun-he's still watching the travelogue...
Taken as a whole, Ray's film has the generosity and the prodigal variety of genius. Nevertheless, to moviegoers accustomed to the visual shorthand of Hollywood's clichés, it will probably seem sometimes to maunder in Oriental obscurities, to go the long way round to nowhere. Ray might well reply that life itself usually takes the same route and reaches the same destination, and this movie is obviously intended to be like life-not like other movies...