Word: orpheus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Black Orpheus (French). Director Marcel Camus (no kin to Novelist-Playwright Albert) has fashioned an impressive, wildly poetic film from a Brazilian poet's adaptation of the Orpheus legend. The unknown but graceful cast, and the breathtaking image presented of Negro life during a tropical carnival earned it the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes...
...child in the centrifuge stands for modern man in the society he has made. This is the metaphor at the core of this cruel, powerful picture from France, in which the New Wave of cinematic creation matches the high-water mark established by Black Orpheus (TIME, Nov. 16). Like that film, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) is the work of an unknown: a 27-year-old cinema critic named Francois Truffaut, who made the film for only $110,000. Last May the picture won him the Cannes Film Festival's award for the year's best...
Shown in France, the picture delighted the public, astonished the critics, won the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes. Part of its appeal, no doubt, derives from the timeless charm of the old legend itself, which Scenarist Jacques Viot has adapted simply and gracefully. Orpheus is a Rio streetcar conductor; Eurydice is a village girl who comes to the big city to visit her cousin and to escape from a sinister stranger who wants to kill her. They fall in love and go down to the city together to celebrate the carnival in the streets. There her enemy, who is Death...
...money. He slept on the beach to save hotel bills, lived from meal to meal, worked from reel to reel. Down to his last $17, he was rescued by Brazil's President Juscelino Kubitschek, who told the army to get him some electrical equipment. For his Orpheus, Camus hired a handsome Brazilian futebol player named Breno Mello, for his Eurydice an unknown dancer from Pittsburgh with serenely lovely looks and a name that nobody could possibly forget: Marpessa Dawn. "The poverty," says Camus, "was not such a bad thing in the long run. I spent so much time trailing...
...unknown actors. "They speak of cinema," says one critic, "as of a religion.'' So far, it seems to be a religion in which demons figure more prominently than angels, but so long as the new cult of cinema can create a ritual as richly moving as Black Orpheus, it will claim its converts...