Word: offscreen
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...tracks Griffith's long parabola, Richard Schickel also provides an exhilarating, authoritative account of the early days of film when anything seemed possible on-and offscreen. During the green director's first year, 1908, he cranked out 60 one-reelers in six months, following up with 151 more in 1909. He put in a seven-day week, sunrise to sunset. Along the way, Griffith practically invented the autocratic personality of film director. On the set he tended to treat actors as children, looking down his "fine, cantilevered nose," as Lionel Barrymore put it. He was not above firing...
...five re-released films, screams are at a minimum. Most of the mayhem-the stabbing in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the strangling in Vertigo, the dismembering in Rear Window, the death in The Trouble with Harry-takes place offscreen. Only the gruesome garroting in Rope is shown to the viewer, and that at the film's beginning. But if the viewer's desire for crime is not satisfied, the character's compulsion for punishment is. In Rope, two bright young men kill a classmate, hide his body in a living-room chest, then throw...
...Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and the Council of Ministers . . ." At that point the screen went blank for a moment, and then the outlines of a familiar face with heavy spectacles appeared. Kirilov continued to intone offscreen: ". . . with deep sorrow inform the party and the entire Soviet people that Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, died after a long illness at 16:50 on Feb. 9,1984." The face on the screen...
...said little and stole much of the show, and he is now mightily sought after by Hollywood. But for no strange reason, the film he has currently chosen to do, Country, is a Walt Disney movie that also stars (and is co-produced by) Actress Jessica Lange, his offscreen live-in companion. In what has been described as a modern-day Grapes of Wrath, Shepard and Lange, who teamed up in Frances last year, this time play a struggling Midwestern couple who are losing their farm. They have just finished shooting in two little Iowa towns during some...
...film appears to have been the victim of an editorial chain-saw massacre. Whatever the executive reasons for reducing its three-hour running time to just over two may have been, considerations of dramatic coherence cannot have numbered high among them. The female lead (Jobeth Williams) dies offscreen, her passing noted in just a line or two of dialogue. Another major character, a farmer and family man (John Cullum), gets shot by squatters, and his widowed wife and orphaned children react only by turning toward the sound of the gun. Charac ters tumble in and out like cards...