Word: ranald
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ferrer and Inger Stevens as one of the three survivors of an earth-shattering atomic disaster (the script is based roughly on a prophetic 1902 novel entitled The Purple Cloud). By all reports, despite a clumsy story it is Belafonte's best acting job to date. Writer-Director Ranald MacDougall was surprised by Belafonte's chameleon ability to take on the emotional coloration of almost any scene he was playing. At one point Belafonte was required to go into a wrecked church, sit down in a pew and cry. "I didn't give him any direction...
Married. Nanette Fabray, 36. TV singer, dancer and actress (Caesar's Hour, 1954-56); and Ranald MacDougall, 42, movie writer and director; both for the second time; in Manhattan...
Producer Jerry (Johnny Belinda) Wald and Scripter Ranald MacDougall have taken plenty of liberties, but that should not offend Hemingway fans who recognize that To Have and Have Not is one of the master's lesser works. The script reshuffles characters and incidents, creates new ones, even switches locales (from the Florida keys and Cuba to the California coast and Mexico). In reshaping the novel, it softens some cutting edges. But the story is still tough, violent and essentially true to the book's central figure: a rugged individualist, desperately down on his luck...
...hard, high-strung little novels twelve years ago, it struck many screen-wise readers that he was putting on paper a kind of movie that Hollywood would never dare put on celluloid. Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder sensationally proved how wrong that was, two years ago, with Double Indemnity, Ranald Mac-Dougall, Catherine Turney and Michael Curtiz followed up last year with Mildred Pierce, less expert yet crudely exciting. But the screen version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the first, most ferocious and in some ways best of Cain's novels, suggests that the vein is running...
Such examples of plain commonsense and good storytelling may be credited in part to the script (by Ranald Mac Dougall and Lester Cole), with its careful attention to such matters as insect bites, the yells of jungle birds, the setting of a grenade trap, the use of plasma and salt and atabrine tablets. But still more credit goes to the veteran director, Raoul Walsh. Objective, Burma! gets pretty long, and you can seldom forget that its soldiers are really just actors; but within the limits possible to fictional war movies, it is about as good as they come...