Word: pandro
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Much to their credit Producer Pandro Berman and Director Vincente Minelli have stoutly refused to spice up the sin or gloss over the grimness of Emma's life. Instead, at a leisurely and often-lagging pace they have pried into every nook & cranny of Emma's avid, neurotic soul and the drab existence that nourished it. The handling of bumbling peasants and pompous tradesmen has an acid authority. One memorable scene-a whirling, overheated ball at a local château-is a wonderfully skillful projection of Emma's half-swooning sense of her own seductiveness...
...differently are sultry Sandra Kolter (Hedy Lamarr), who discovers that the violinist husband she left behind is more exciting than the Follies, and knock-kneed Susan Gallagher (Judy Garland), who graduates to top billing as a singer. Although their tribulations are never worth the length that short, swart Producer Pandro Berman devotes to them, Miss Garland warbles a torrid tropical tune, Minnie From Trinidad, with true professional gusto. Miss Turner manages the limbs that are to go into limbo and an occasional dramatic sequence with talent, and Miss Lamarr does not spare her uncanny physical charms...
Produced by Pandro S. Berman (Gunga Din, Michael Strogoff), the picture has big milling mobs, the Cathedral of Notre Dame (with close-ups of Gothic sculpture), some of the year's choicest bits of sadism (a flogging, a racking, an unsuccessful hanging), a pitched battle on the cathedral steps, and darkly witching Maureen O'Hara, last seen in a den of cut throats in Jamaica Inn, here seen in a den of cutthroats in medieval Paris...