Word: rattigan
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Young Scarface (M.K.D. Distributors], imported from England three years after it was filmed, should have stayed discreetly at home. It starts with an impressive list of credits: an adaptation of Novelist Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, scripted by Greene and Terence Rattigan (see below) for the producing-directing team of John and Roy (Seven Days Till Noon) Boulting. But the film reflects little credit on any of them...
...recent years of exchange between London's Shaftesbury Avenue and New York's Broadway have been fruitful ones for the theatre. The introduction of Christopher Fry and Terrence Rattigan are two of the more important benefits derived at this end, and the English can be thankful for several excellent musical comedies as well as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller...
...London and Broadway stage hit, The Winslow Boy (1946-47), Playwright Terence Rattigan stuck fairly closely to the facts of the Archer-Shee case, while rigging them skillfully for theatrical effect. In the movie version, Scripters Rattigan and Anatole de Grunwald stick too closely to the play. As a result, despite some superior dialogue and top-drawer British acting, the film plods along with more patience than it is likely to find in U.S. moviegoers...
...Rattigan's fidelity to Rattigan is also responsible for some troublesome defects. He commits the serious cinematic sin of letting his climax - the boy's final legal victory - take place offscreen, as it did offstage. In the play, the impossibly haughty barrister who wins the case was a rich treat of tasteful theatrical ham. But the grand-mannered role is so patently written to be played across footlights that, before the lifelike intimacy of the camera, even a technically flawless performance by Robert Donat fails to inspire belief. Usually an adept dramatic craftsman, Scripter Rattigan also runs...
...Arthur Rank's London Films Company has made another first-rate movie. It transforms to the screen Terence Rattigan's successful play about the fight to clear the Winslow boy of unjust forgery and robbery charges which led to expulsion from the Admiralty Naval College...