Word: nuremberg
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...World adds up to 3 i hours of relentless overstatement. Producer-Director Stanley Kramer, a man for the big promise, conceived "a comedy to end all comedies." What has evolved after several years of preparation is $9,400,000 worth of unpalatable entertainment, more star-laden than Judgment at Nuremberg and longer (though sometimes less amusing) than On the Beach. Filmed in 70 mm. Ultra Panavision and the new seamless, single-lens Cinerama, Kramer's epic can rightly be called a blockbuster-the blocks busted or severely strained during its marathon frenzy include those of three Plymouths, four Fords...
...even more impressive credentials. It is directed by Vittorio De Sica. It stars, along with Fredric March and Robert Wagner, two 1961 Oscar winners: Sophia Loren and Maximilian Schell. And it is written by Abby Mann, who also carried off a 1961 Oscar for his script of Judgment at Nuremberg. But there will hardly be any such laurels for Altona. It is a ponderous, pretentious, interminable Germanic muddle of a movie, one of the year's noisier bombs...
...Sartre presses it with French finesse. The film, to put it kindly, is less subtle. Scenarist Mann is a self-righteous and didactic young fellow who seems to feel that he has been personally appointed by Providence to sit in judgment on 80 million Germans. In Altona as in Nuremberg, his script is angry, preachy, shrill. It not only talks down. It is filled with the sort of teacher-knows-best truism ("It is better to face the truth no matter what the cost") that for reply invites a spitball...
...embassy I ever had." He had a deputy who "used to drive the Communists crazy by talking Eskimo over the telephone on a tapped line," a first secretary who doubled as economist and "still had time to draft Voice of America broadcasts," an officer "who ran a truck to Nuremberg every two weeks for supplies," one consul, one vice-consul, one code clerk, three secretaries, and a military establishment consisting of "an Air Force colonel and an Army colonel who competed unhappily for the assistance of one sergeant...
From a Barren Room. A young man of great energy, some talent, and no humility, Mann is currently the most active screenwriter in Hollywood. Since he won an Oscar last year for Judgment at Nuremberg, every Hollywood producer has been trying to sign him to write a script, and lucky actors whisper importantly to their friends that they have been cast "to do an Abby Mann." Later they whisper to Mann himself, saying what a great writer you are, darling. When a writer steps into that sort of atmosphere and is incautious enough to believe what the flatterers tell...