Word: reels
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Ironic Gossip. Snow correctly saw the Communists as much more than a bunch of bandits. But his enthusiastic characterization of the leaders as Reel Robin Hoods seemed somewhat overdrawn. Later, during Joseph McCarthy's heyday, Snow was castigated as a Red propagandist. Ironically, he was also the target of gossip linking him to the Central Intelligence Agency. Whatever the charges, Snow never forgot that he was an American. He made no move to renounce citizenship, as did some admirers of Mao, and his 20-year-old daughter Sian (the name means "Western Peace" in Mandarin) is a student...
...imminence in the dramatic experience. Who will come, or break, through the door next? What devastating words will unexpectedly be uttered? That is what has made Pinter an edge-of-the-seat dramatist. Even when he was, as English Critic Alan Brien once said, "a Hitchcock with the last reel missing," he still provided the electric Hitchcock tension. Beginning with the one-acters, Landscape and Silence, Pinter became enamored of static ruminative monologues that belong more properly to the novel than to drama...
...takes so long to achieve her goal that she wonders whether it was all worthwhile. It was not. With the exception of Zohra Lampert's subtle and knowledgeable performance, no one in the cast has enough substance even to be considered humanoid. And after the first reel, the vampires seem to have lost their bite. Perhaps they, like the viewer, should have been forewarned by James Thurber's celebrated dictum: Don't count your boobies until they are hatched...
Capra's early life does sound like one of his scenarios. An immigrant Sicilian, one of seven kids, he has to take almost as many jobs as courses to get himself through school. His first movie work, directing a one-reel rendition of a Kipling poem, is a chance opportunity...
...film strikes a sometimes successful, sometimes tenuous balance between suspenseful diversion and romantic melodrama. Klute's character is never adequately probed, and there is an uncomfortable number of genre cliches, including a hoked-up terror-in-the-last-reel episode that lacks both terror and surprise. Worse, the sentimental fadeout runs completely contrary to the strenuously realistic tone the film has struggled to sustain...