Word: screens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cloudy Screen. By sundown, Sunday's quality shows disappear in a flood of guns, games and dramas like the Roy Rogers Show, Earn Your Vacation, the College of Musical Knowledge, the Loretta Young Show and What's My Line? These shows are not bad in themselves-but they offer a cloud no bigger than a TV screen on the Sunday horizon. The increase in their numbers means that network program directors have discovered that Sunday can be a pretty good thing after all. In this frame of mind, they could spoil everything by making Sunday an everyday affair...
...that puts out more and better humor than any place since Hollywood in the silent days. In such marvelously handwrought hilarities as Tight Little Island, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Titfield Thunderbolt, the Baling people have created, for the first time, an inimitably English screen style: "the little comedy." (Ealing's three Alec Guinness comedies alone have probably grossed about $2,250,000 in U.S. theaters...
...Stage 17 of its Hollywood lot last week, Paramount Pictures Corp. held a press preview of White Christmas in VistaVision, its new wide-screen process and the newest entry in moviedom's gadgetry sweepstakes. Viewers thought that VistaVision resulted, as advertised, in greater clarity on the screen, but few predicted sensational effects at the box office. Said one producer: "CinemaScope got there first amd VistaVision isn't novel and different enough...
Dragnet (Warner) is the second major television show-I Love Lucy led the way with The Long, Long Trailer (TIME, Feb. 22 )-to make the tricky segue from the electronic to the silver screen. The transition is fairly well accomplished in a general way, though sometimes what goes big in the parlor gets lost in the movie house (e.g., the staccato monotone, urgent and effective when the actor is only ten inches high and has to exaggerate plenty to get attention, is just a meaningless affectation when he is 20 feet tall...
...because it makes a good title for the film). Sinatra demonstrates that the years of microphone fixation, aggravated perhaps by the recitation of popular-song lyrics, have given him a full command of pathological gesture; but through no fault of Sinatra's, the pathology takes up so much screen time that moviegoers might fittingly be provided with white coats. Still, the general impression is that he acts a good deal more imaginatively than he ever sang. Good shot: the triggerman, boobytrapped by an automatic rifle wired up to a high-voltage line, twitching convulsively as he squeezes the trigger...