Word: screens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chariot race in Rome's Cinecitta, was the largest ever made for any movie. It covered 18 acres, held 10,000 people and 40,000 tons of sand, took a year to complete, and cost $1,000,000. The race itself, which runs only nine minutes on the screen, ran three months before the cameras and cost another million. Three months before the shooting stopped, Production Manager Henry Henigson had a serious heart attack, and two weeks later Producer Sam Zimbalist had a fatal one. By the time the cameras had finally stopped rolling, MGM's London laboratories...
Great credit goes to Producer Zimbalist, Scenarist Tunberg and Director Wyler, but the greatest belongs to Wyler. His wit, intelligence and formal instinct are almost everywhere in evidence, and he has set a standard of excellence by which coming generations of screen spectacles can expect to be measured. His virtues have been agreeably rewarded. Friends report that his percentage-of-profits deal with M-G-M will put him on easy street for the rest of his life. But it is probable that MGM, which was in a shaky financial spot when the project was launched, will not have...
Adapter A. E. Hotchner almost managed to make it to the first commercial before introducing the killers. By the time he reached the ending of the original story, the TV play still had 41 minutes to go. Scenes minced on and off screen without coming to terms with the story or adding to its significance: a cop with a TV announcer's hairdo trying to lead a lady cashier into adultery, the problems of ambitious adolescents who want too much too soon, a priest who unknowingly gives the fighter's address to the killers...
Late in the film the directors flash a Q-bomb explosion on the screen and then announce, "this is not really the end of our picture." A film like The Mouse That Roars is encouraging, for without this ability to laugh at our insane weaponry, such a finale might be worth contemplating...
Third Man on the Mountain (Buena Vista) may well become a children's classic of the screen, a sort of Tom Sawyer in the Alps. Based on James Ramsey Ullman's Banner in the Sky, the film describes the Alpine adventures of a teen-aged Swiss village boy (James MacArthur) who vows he will be the first climber to reach the top of the Matterhorn (known in the script as The Citadel) or die in the attempt as his father died before him. He joins the expedition of an English mountaineer (Michael Rennie) as a porter...