Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lena Horne is probably the only person capable of singing "Stormy Weather" in a movie scene, while a large, crystalline tear courses down her right cheek--and get away with it. She manages to make the schmalz inherent in the scene seem plausible. That the script calls upon her to perform such a feat, and that she does it, present a good summary of quality of both script and performers...
Certainly "Stormy Weather" has too much sticky sentiment, too much sound and fury. The script is not worth the paper it is written on, but not even a poor script can hold a good entertainer down...
This sort of journey-through-society script might have led to a movie that really moved with the erratic spontaneity of street life. But The Bicycle Thief is oddly static. Events move predictably and almost mechanically. Each small experience of the distraught hero is meticulously rounded and forced in sentiment, character coloring and social comment.Even the minor movements of the actors-the boy's tumble on a rainy street, the mother's fingering of her cheek-appear overrehearsed...
...lighting. The camera, often threading through Stark's career like a fond mamma looking for her child in a crowd, turns up all kinds of unpredictable and realistic touches. Occasionally, Director Rossen plunges spiritedly into a scene as though, in the Rossellini manner, he were making up the script as he went along...
...Karas to London, kept him plucking away at his tunes for six weeks while Reed recorded a sound track. When the film was released two months ago in England, Karas' music caused as much of a furor as Reed's directing, Graham Greene's lickety-split script, or the acting of the all-star cast (Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard...