Word: scenarists
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Long Ago, Tomorrow is a British film about two paralytics who find their handicaps no barrier to love. There are perhaps a dozen other ways to describe the plot, none of which would make it sound any less sentimental. Moreover, Director-Scenarist Bryan Forbes (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) seems less dedicated to insights than to untoward assaults on the tear ducts...
...film falters before its destination. But never has an English-language film glistened with so many social nuances. In part, the credit is due to Director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy); he has also contributed a cluster of stylistic debits. The essential triumph of Sunday Bloody Sunday belongs to Scenarist Penelope Gilliatt, whose plot alone challenges the customary moral institutions...
Those credentials have hemidemisemi-quavers of Alma Mahler, who also combined personal beauty and an intellectual signal that achievers found irresistible. But Gilliatt's life has no such grand Viennese design. The first major film critic since James Agee to enjoy distinction as a scenarist, she has become something of a recluse, both in her life and work. The prominent are never the subjects of her fiction, so far almost twoscore polished short stories and two novels, largely about the odd, unfashionable characters whom Anthony Burgess reviewed as "defiantly interesting...
With Good Reason. Back in 1967, Audrey Hepburn played a blind girl pursued by a homicidal maniac. But in Wait Until Dark, Playwright Frederick Knott used a series of ingenious devices to keep the killer and the audience dangling. In See No Evil, Scenarist Brian Clemens offers no motivations and precious few plot twists. Nor is his head-on harum-scarum approach improved by Richard Fleischer's blunt direction, which favors sudden cuts to broken corpses and sadistic closeups of a girl precipitously tumbling into catatonia. Manifestly, Fleischer is out for only one thing: to inspire sudden fear. That...
...Between thus represents something of a departure for both Director Losey and Scenarist Pinter. It is a film of formal, almost sculpted elegance, of precise, leisurely beauty permeated by melancholy. Watching it is very much like reading a long, old-fashioned novel, for its virtues are as much literary as visual: a strong sense of plot, nuances of character shrewdly observed, a delicate sense of theme and dialogue. It is an extraordinarily pleasurable and successful movie in a minor...