Word: screenplays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This conventional screenplay has been filmed in entirely unconventional style by Producer-Director George (A Place in the Sun) Stevens. One of Hollywood's most painstaking craftsmen, Stevens for the first time has turned his individualistic director's talents to a western-and with striking results. From the opening shot in which buckskin-clad Shane, a sort of blond Apollo of the plains, rides into view on a roan horse, the film is marked by the kind of distinctive, richly detailed picture-making that is scarcely ever lavished on the most high-toned movie drama, let alone...
...other night, after seeing Les Enfants de Paradis at the Brattle, I was strongly moved to both ecstatic praise and frustrating anger. There was and is no doubt in my mind that the movie is a masterpiece--in acting, screenplay, photography and direction. I was angry at myself only because I had never learned French well enough to do without the English subtitles. I have seen many French movies, and never felt so furious about this, but I have never seen a foreign language movie comparable to Les Enfants de Paradis...
Directed and co-authored by onetime Lawyer André Cayatte, Justice Is Done is well acted, and the strands of its many characters and incidents are adroitly interwoven. But the screenplay is often on the super-melodramatic side. Subtitled The Secret Lives and Loves of a French Jury, the picture goes in for such farfetched plotting as having the defendant's lover (Michel Auclair) woo an elderly lady juror (Valentine Tessier) in order to win over her vote. And, even for courtroom drama, Justice Is Done is far too talky...
...Ashore (Columbia) is an amiable little cinemusical with pretty girls, Technicolored scenery, several jingly songs-and practically no screenplay. The slapdash script follows three sailors (Mickey Rooney, Dick Haymes, Ray McDonald) through their shore leave at Catalina. By the fadeout, at a lavish Polynesian beach party, they have each found a girl (Barbara Bates, Jody Lawrence, Peggy Ryan). This is the sort of picture in which the characters have such names as Moby Dickerson and Gay Knight. All Ashore is at its brightest when it gives sawed-off Mickey Rooney a chance to hoof, sing, do assorted pratfalls...
Plymouth Adventure, based on an imaginative, fictional account of the Mayflower voyage, tacks on to history an affair between Dorothy Bradford (Gene Tierney) and the skipper. But the movie dehydrates the romance into one embrace, and then forces Mrs. Bradford into a quick suicide. Besides this, the screenplay only diverges from the accepted in its characterization of the captain, a figure not discussed in any of the records...