Word: screens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...principal characters, set against a ballet-like background of black-suited functionaries running back and forth across the screen, are somewhat unreal, as those in fantasy should be. But they seem to enjoy living in the world M. Clair has made for them. After a drunken dinner, for instance, the materialist exudes enthusiasm as he pelts his own portrait with wine glasses. In short Clair has shown that there are pleasanter ways to criticize the advances of modern technology than through the grim didacticism of an Orwellian nightmare...
Died. John Hodiak (real name: John Pagorzelliec), 41, actor of stage (The Caine Mutiny Court Martial) and screen (Trial, Battleground), and onetime husband of Cinemactress Anne Baxter; of a coronary thrombosis while shaving in his parents' home as he prepared to leave for 20th Century-Fox studios to complete work on his 32nd movie, Threshold of Space, the story of Space Surgeon John Paul Stapp, whom he was playing; in Tarzana, Calif...
...what will the customers get for their money? They will get what is surely one of the biggest musicals ever put on film. The Todd-AO screen is 50 ft. wide and 25 ft. high, and the picture lasts 2½ hours with one intermission. They will also get a picture that, whatever its merits as mass entertainment, bears about as much relation to the Broadway Oklahoma! as a 1956 Cadillac does to the surrey with the fringe...
Like corn like picture. The charm of the play was in its note, however falsetto, of meadowy romp and dooryard homeliness. But the demand of the giant screen is for size and spectacle. The figure of Laurie, far away and touching as she sings Out of My Dreams ("and into your arms"), becomes on the screen a colossal closeup in which the heroine's left nostril alone is large enough to park a jeep in. The dances, too, come far too close for comfort. Though Agnes de Mille revised them for the camera, they now seem more like sophomore...
...Knife, from first frame to last, arches with tension like a drawn bow. The Odets script, adapted for the screen by James Poe, has been beautifully grained and shaped by two fine craftsmen, and it takes every ounce of strain that Producer-Director Robert Aldrich leans against it. Aldrich gets striking performances from his actors. Jack Palance, a gifted portrayer of brute instinct, is miscast as a man whose problem is the loss of his instincts, but his intensity and sincerity propel the action vigorously even where they confuse its motives. Ida Lupino, as always, is a capable trouper; Shelley...