Word: odyssey
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...FILM about progress--physical, social, and technological--Stanley Kubrick's huge and provocative 2001: A Space Odyssey remains essentially linear until its extraordinary ending. In the final transfiguration, director Kubrick and co-author Arthur Clarke (Childhood's End) suggest that evolutionary progress may in face be cyclical, perhaps in the shape of a helix formation. Man progresses to a certain point in evolution, then begins again from scratch on a higher level. Much of 2001's conceptual originality derives from its being both anti-Christian and anti-evolutionary in its theme of man's progress controlled by an ambiguous extra...
...designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, on an off-day. A lengthy fight sequence between Heston and the apes achieves next to no continuity because director Franklin Schaffner fools around too much with the camera. But the apes themselves, if a cut below their remarkable prototypes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could easily be worse--with lousy makeup or lousy actors. Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and Maurice Evans are the best...
Last week NBC ran a dramatization of John Steinbeck's folksy odyssey, Travels with Charley. The scenery was impressive, but stagy re-enactments of scenes from the book were tossed in like roadblocks, and the show got lost east of the Black Hills. National Educational Television claimed an American TV first by showing a remarkable 30-minute color film of a baby's birth. But the program was spoiled by one of those dull panel discussions that plague so much of Public...
...odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique...
Planet of the Apes "The monkey," said Henry Ward Beecher, "is an organized sarcasm upon the human race." The sarcasm is seldom allowed to speak for itself in this film about a space odyssey that goes awry and crash-lands three astronauts on an unknown planet. They have been traveling for a cool millennium or so, but their craft has been zooming along at close to the speed of light, and so-in accordance with Einstein's Time-Dilation Theory-they have scarcely aged, save for some grey in their beards. At first, all they find is sand...