Word: schelle
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...play transformed turgid history into skillful theater and tired slogans into existential epigrams. This film, adapted freely from the drama, presents even more impressive credentials. It is directed by Vittorio De Sica. It stars, along with Fredric March and Robert Wagner, two 1961 Oscar winners: Sophia Loren and Maximilian Schell. And it is written by Abby Mann, who also carried off a 1961 Oscar for his script of Judgment at Nuremberg. But there will hardly be any such laurels for Altona. It is a ponderous, pretentious, interminable Germanic muddle of a movie, one of the year's noisier bombs...
What went wrong? The script. Scenarist Mann is a competent carpenter, and he has no trouble assembling the big blocks of Sartre's story. At war's end the sensitive son (Schell) of a German shipping magnate (March) shuts himself up in his father's attic and for 15 years pretends that his country lies in permanent ruins. To his crazy way of thinking, if defeat had not really meant destruction for his country, how then could he justify the killing he had done, the crimes he had committed to assure his country's survival...
...this Elbe of verbiage Director De Sica sinks without a bubble. In scene after scene he simply aims his camera at a famous face and hopes for the best. He seldom gets it. Loren looks stupid in a stupid part. Schell, in a role demanding virility and violence, behaves like a hysterical girl. March, for want of anything better to play, plays March. Wagner at least gives the customers something to snicker at. His sunny California accent sounds gloriously silly in foggy old Hamburg, and when he walks in to take over the family firm, he looks wildly...
Star and starlet were shining up to each other: Maximilian Schell, 32, a highly touted Hamlet in Hamburg, and former Queen Soraya, 31, who adorned his opening night and who reportedly takes tips from Max about her new movie career. What's cosmically significant about that? Nothing, says Max. So why don't those lens-happy "reporters of the international scandal press" leave him alone? Soliloquizing in the West German daily Die Welt, onetime Journalist Schell added: "They squat like monkeys in trees, they hang like grape clusters from airliner stairways. Pitiless as wasps, they live...
...great season started off insuspiciously, however, when Ford and Horn were trounced by Coast Guard in the Danmark Regatta, the first event of the fall, held in late September. The only other loss of the season, also to Coast Guard, came after a close finish in the Schell regatta, forcing the Crimson to relinquish the Schell trophy which...