Word: newsreel
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...historical fatalism of Citizen Kane. Resisting the megalomania that attends the making of blockbusters, Beatty plays it not safe but careful, stocking the movie with ingratiating motifs: Christmas trees, old songs, dogs, hats, chandeliers, white lilies, waiting taxis and one adorably solemn child. Dispensing with period photos or newsreel clips in which the historical John Reed might compete with Beatty's Jack, the film instead takes testimony from 32 "witnesses"-old friends and colleagues like Henry Miller, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Rebecca West, who offer a Kane-like kaleidoscope of memories. The rest of Reds is a nonstop...
...should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit...
Milos Forman seems to have understood this. The film's first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first...
There could have been trumpets, a heavenly choir, an enveloping cushion of fleece and lots of silver streamers?at least a few moguls and a newsreel camera. Someone important might have been there to introduce these two acting legends about to cross paths for the first time. "Alice Adams, meet Young Mr. Lincoln. Mary of Scotland, this is Wyatt Earp. Tracy Lord, Tom Joad. Tess Harding, Mister Roberts. Ethel Thayer, say hello to Norman Thayer Jr. Katharine Hepburn. . .Henry Fonda...
...scenes flickered by with the familiarity of an old newsreel. Across Poland last week, the strike sirens were wailing once again as millions of workers dropped their tools for an hour to protest a worsening food shortage and the harassment of Solidarity union members. Workers wearing red-and-white armbands clustered at factory gates, shop fronts and mine entrances under a cold fall drizzle. In the Baltic port city of Gdansk, where Solidarity was born 14 months ago, hundreds of men and women gathered at the Lenin Shipyard and draped its gate with flowers. In heavily industrialized Silesia, brawny metalworkers...