Word: miscasting
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...those pleasant people were terribly miscast. Jo is what we want to be when we're kids. She's not offensively fresh (she doesn't alienate the world in the proces). But she is effective (she insults the grown-ups enough to hold her own place). Noelle Caskey seemed more put-upon than pushy. She played a snubnosed sweetie...
...Harry Truman-how badly can history miscast? The American people rather liked him when he first turned up in the White House. He was embarrassingly humble. He said he wasn't up to the job. But there was no escape. He decided, he acted. But for whatever reasons-was it because he was vulgar?-Truman's popularity kept going down, never up, and when he was elected President in his own right in November 1948, it was such a surprise as to seem to be a fluke-which it was. When Harry Truman left the White House...
Mark Ritts as the hotel proprietor is so-so. He is miscast -- a bigger, older man should play the retired army bully -- and it is difficult for him to achieve the ponderous viciousness he needs. As it is, he sounds like one of those characters who stuff tin cans in their boots and go kill people. Baptistin (Joshua Rubins), his uncle, is up to his vocation: groaning in a rheumatic passion on a revolving bed which swings into view in case of a raid...
What attacks Generals fatally and finally is neither its cliché-ridden script nor its miscast stars, but the gemütlich approach of Director Anatole Litvak. The slick editing and the bright, bold colors seem less to polish the picture than to varnish it, and they cannot cover the film's faults. The waifs of German-occupied Warsaw are too plump and well padded, the armies seem too clean and well mannered. And the officers are too self-consciously symbolic of Germany's decadence and decency, grossness and grace. Somewhere beneath it all is a plausible plot...
Scenarist Paul Dehn, who also wrote the script for Spy, this time too often jumps the main track of the tale to lollygag along a branch line, and Director Sidney Lumet (The Group) has either miscast or misdirected some of his principals. Mason and Signoret, however, are pathetically impressive as a couple of mice wandering in a maze designed for rats. And as a whole, the film convincingly elucidates in a modern instance why Dante consigned traitors to the very pit of hell. Le Carre similarly perceives treason as a spiritual attitude underlying the political act. His traitors are liars...