Word: rossen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bestseller by Glendon Swarthout, is a big, flashy, $4,000,000 Gary Cooper western. Its primary purpose is to grab the top dollar in the November movie market, but incidentally it tries to "put [its] hand," as the script proclaims, "on the bare heart of heroism." Director Robert Rossen, who wrote the script with Ivan Moffat, never gets quite that close to the mystery of courage. But he does examine the nature and conduct of a hero at considerable depth, and he finds in his moral conflicts a stronger motivation for the usual violent action, which in this film...
Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen; United Artists). As writer-producer-director, Robert Rossen spent not much less time (four years) and probably more money ($4,000,000) on the production of this picture than Alexander did on the entire conquest of the Persian Empire, and there can be no doubt that, in some ways, his effect is even more shattering than the martial Macedonian's. The picture presents two hours and 25 minutes of continuously colossal spectacle in CinemaScope, Technicolor and stereophonic sound. There are 6,000 people in the cast and 1,000 horses. Several regiments...
...stuff of spectacle is indeed all here, and Director Rossen has marshaled it with care and passion against the stern Spanish landscape. His best scenes have the faithfulness and the feeling of fine color plates in a history book-King Philip's drunken dance among the corpses at Chaeronea, the hurling of the spear into Asia, the symbolic blow at the navel of a continent when Alexander cut the Gordian knot, the sordid grandeur of Darius' doom, the murder of Cleitus in a childish...
Meanwhile, on the Manzanares River, outside of Madrid, Director-Producer Robert Rossen was busy shooting his multimillion-dollar spectacle, Alexander the Great, using an army of more than 5,000 extras. And M-G-M was waiting its turn to rent the 1,000 horses Rossen is using before starting its own extravaganza...
...sudden boom? Cheap labor is part of the answer. Rossen, who plans to spend $4,000,000 on Alexander, another million on publicity, estimates that it would cost him twice as much in England...