Word: reisz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Catching Up with Theory. The director's battle with Hollywood is far from over. Recently, the associate producer of Isadora, Universal Pictures, hacked away 39 minutes without the assent of Director Karel Reisz. But for The Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger achieved total freedom. "United Artists didn't come near me," he boasts. And Paramount Pictures has granted Mike Nichols final authority over Catch-22. It is happily in the French tradition that the facts are finally catching up with the auteur theory...
...LOVES OF ISADORA. Vanessa Redgrave performs magnificently as Isadora Duncan, that quintessential free spirit of the early 20th century. Director Karel Reisz starts at the end of Isadora's life and works backward and sideways to achieve dramatic contrast, but the script lacks a unifying point of view...
That intelligence can seldom shine through the film. Director Karel Reisz (Morgan!) has found an appropriately Proustian mode in which to tell the story, pouring time forward and then reversing it, like the sand in an hour glass. But he places Isadora, the first natural dancer, on a background of numbing artificiality and casts her opposite a series of unconvincing poseurs and popinjays. The baroque scenario -radically cut from 170 to 131 minutes -is florid without being literate, essentially true to the events, but essentially false to the tragicomic character who made them happen...
...like animated advertisements for the California Fruit Growers Association. In those days, movies were "vehicles" for stars whose on-screen images were doctored by diffusing lenses and light screens and with makeup that was laid on by fellows who should have belonged to the plasterers' union. Now, says Director Reisz, audiences "no longer want to look up to something different. They want stars with whom they can identify...
...date she is delightful?"a smashing bird," says Director Reisz. She can make away with a bottle of Taittinger between 6 and 8, kick up her heels with the Tijuana Brass, get so interested in what someone is saying that she misses her mouth with her fork, and blurt a delightfully risky remark if it seems to be in order. "My bras have all turned yellow," she groaned to a friend recently. "I expect Nanny has boiled them in urine...