Word: pollack
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This sort of technical challenge was evident in Pollack's earlier films, particularly They Shoot Horses, Don't They", but it was the strength of the screenplay and acting that made that film seem so much more significant. Pollack was faced in Horses with the restricted arena of a marathon dance floor and its dressing rooms, the problem of following moving dancers, and pacing tedium and crisis in the course of the marathon. Only top lighting could be used because the cameras needed to pan all 360 degrees of perimeter, and it was emential to give a sense...
...recent years the Western genre has been driven close to its limits, in the long run it has proved a reliable vehicle for action directors' imagination. Pollack's Sealphumnters, with Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis, marked an innovation in the genre. As Pollack says, "It was a black and white film before black and white films were popular, a kind of funky morality play, a bit larger than life and full of a strange kind of banter." Like Jeremiah Johnson, however it did retain elements of the traditional Western...
...Pollack sees new Western, like The Wild Bunch or McCabe and Mrs. Miller as attempts to diversify Western audiences: "There are very few Westerns that have ever made really giant money," so film-makers try to pad out the normal Western audience with added appeals...
...Pollack's films have been (in his words) "period pieces," including the film which he has just finished shooting, The Way We Were. Starring Redford once again, with Barbara Streisand, it is "a political love story, about two very intelligent people who don't end up together because of ideological differences." The film focuses on three different periods in the recent past; the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the '44 election and for the first time in any film, the period of the Hollywood Black Lists...
...Pollack feels this kind of chronological and topical distance has given him additional freedom to work. "It's a little bit like finding a guy who doesn't say a word at party, who's just too painfully shy, then once when you get him on stage where he's got a character to hide behind all sorts of things start to happen..." The Way We Were may bear this out; in any case, it will be a significant film only it Pollack returns to the film-making which characterized They Shoot Horses, a kind of filmmaking whose depth...