Word: rouben
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...there were a few directors who saw the new dimension to pictures as something more than just a way to hear subtitles. The great pioneer who weaved sound and image together was the legendary Ernst Lubitsch. Not so legendary now, but quite the early virtuoso was Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian seemed to be experimenting constantly. His most accepted successes were on the stage (he directed the original stage version of "Porgy and Bess" for example) but his pictures exude a creative excitement that seems to say to the pedestrian studio craftsman, "Well boys, here's a little trick you might pick...
...Reinking and Grey perform feats of theatrical valor, but their talents are wasted. Grey is given only one dance, which he executes with goat-footed guile, while Reinking courses across the stage like a thoroughbred in the stretch. The music races toward oblivion rather than anyone's ears. Rouben Ter-Arutunian's majestic scenery features a columned, rotunda-like set with a cascade of steps. This forces Onna White to choreograph dances in which the chorus troops trippingly, and repeatedly, up and down...
Clearly a lot of TLC went into the staging of Pulcinella, but to uncertain effect. Rouben Ter-Arutunian has tastefully re-created Picasso's costumes and his imposing backdrop-a blue-gray cubist evocation of a moonlit street in 18th century Naples. The vital young Jeffrey dancers, moreover, prance through the one-act ballet as if caught up in a marathon tarantella. But breathing life into this Pulcinella is rather like trying to revive a dead tree by gluing fallen leaves back onto its limbs...
...Norman Mailer, yet every year small ??? film journals surface with long exegeses of ??? or Hawks, or critical re??? evaluations of Allan D.?wn's Sands of ??? Jimd. Incredible as it may seem, new books are on the stands about such ??? as John Franken heimer ( Grand Prix ) and Rouben Mamoulian ( The Mark of Zorro ), men whose stature stands in direct relation to that of ??ving Wallace or Ricky Nelson, Sadly, the conventions of film-making which these critics ??? to are still governed by an aesthetic derived from ??? ??? novels and plays: dramatic sense pacing ??? ??? and clear cut chronologies are among the touchstones...
...gets. And she rightly employs a warm, mellow glow only once--for Duncan's arrival at Inverness Castle. She makes some use of a follow-spot, but it is never obtrusive in musical-comedy fashion. Many of her effects would be impossible without the marvelous unit set designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian--two converging cavernous walls of shiny but unsmooth silver, parts of which can swing in; and, hovering overhead, a structure suggestive of some enormous gray mythic bat, through whose wings lights sometimes filter. Ter-Arutunian also designed the costumes, which belong to no one period. For the most...