Word: screenplays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Scaramouche (M-G-M), based on Rafael Sabatini's costume-adventure yarn of pre-revolutionary France, combines spirited swordplay with a somewhat sluggish screenplay. Scaramouche (Stewart Granger) is an aristocrat who is bent on avenging the murder of his friend by malevolent Monarchist Mel Ferrer. Not only does Granger prove more than worthy of Master Swordsman Ferrer's steel; he also proves to be quite a gay blade by hiding out from the authorities with a troupe of traveling players. By the fadeout, Granger has found that Ferrer is really his halfbrother, and, in a happier twist...
Though played on a larger stage, High Treason is not quite so dynamic as Seven Days to Noon. The screenplay sometimes bogs down in low melodrama, and the pace lags now & then for wordy political digressions. But in Boulting's camera-wise direction the picture mostly crackles with pseudo-documentary excitement. The spectacular climax, as the saboteurs try to take over massive Battersea power station, was filmed at the actual locale among a futuristic welter of catwalks, dynamos and generating equipment. And Director Boulting gives the fanciful plot a realistic look with the odd British types who get tangled...
...budget thriller of grade-A caliber about G-men hunting down H-bomb spies. The fun begins when foreign agents kidnap a nuclear physicist's son and hold him for a ransom in atomic formulas. The cops & robbers story is an old formula itself, but the tightly knit screenplay bristles with tingling action and intriguing mechanical devices used by the FBI operatives to track down the criminals: car-to-car telephones, kinescope, television cameras with zoom lenses...
Singing in the Rain (MGM) reunites Dancing Star Gene Kelly and Producer Arthur Freed of the Academy Award-winning An American in Paris with a screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who wrote Kelly's highly successful On the Town. The result, though pretty and tuneful, is not so opulent as the first, nor so inventive as the second...
...actual facts of the case. Operation Cicerco is a script-writer's dream, loaded with enough surprises and ironic twists (including the fact that the Germans refused to believe that the documents were genuine) to fill half-a-dozen run-of-the-mill espionage thrillers. In addition, Mankiewicz's screenplay contains some effective frills of its own: a love affair between the valet and a former employer, a beautiful Polish countess, some bright epigrammatic dialogue, and an array of skillfully drawn diplomatic officials. Particularly clever use is made of the contrasting personalities of the pompous, victimized, British Ambassador (superbly played...