Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...long way to go, and he knows it. In his latest picture. The World, the Flesh and the Devil, to be released in April, he is co-starred with Mel Ferrer and Inger Stevens as one of the three survivors of an earth-shattering atomic disaster (the script is based roughly on a prophetic 1902 novel entitled The Purple Cloud). By all reports, despite a clumsy story it is Belafonte's best acting job to date. Writer-Director Ranald MacDougall was surprised by Belafonte's chameleon ability to take on the emotional coloration of almost any scene...
Obviously this sort of script calls for desperate measures. John D. Hancock, who directed, has taken them, but they are the wrong ones. In his efforts to stir up laughter, he has employed books, scrolls, wineskins, spectacles, a rolling pin, a gavel, quill pens, a pitcher, drinking glasses, an earring, a pogo stick, and a live rabbit, among other things. If the rabbit could have been induced to misbehave on cue, I have no doubt but that this would also have been added to the pleasures of the occasion. The cast performs with commendable energy, which might better have been...
...those people who, when they are not leaning against something, contrive somehow to appear to be leaning against themselves; relaxed, charming, and funny. William D. Gordy has directed a cheerful and reasonably no-sweat performance, punctuated with occasional bits of funny-business, several of which are funny. If the script had not been one that only a high school French teacher could love, the results might have been quite pleasant...
Farce tends to make Harvard actors foresake the search for truth in favor of mugging and running around, and none of these three productions is exempt from this tendency. As indicated above, there are compensations (Jane Fishburne's imaginative costumes comprise another.) But whoever exhumed these scripts deserves a citation for industry very far beyond the call of duty. There is something exhilarating about a triumph over a script that has outlived its audience-appeal, but there is something even more exhilarating about a successful collaboration with a good...
From the moment Trouper Verdon turns plain Essie into a glittering song-and-dance girl, Redhead stops being deadhead. Her articulate hands, toes and torso are parts of speech and her lines are more pleasing than the script's. Her body is an erotic spoof spelling sex in quotes, as she overtilts a wayward hip or dislocates an amorous shoulder; in marathon-long dances, the stage is her keyboard, and she never hits a wrong note. Under the bravura assurance lies an endearing Chaplinesque poignance. Smiles of delight cross the wistful, wide-eyed Verdon face, like sudden dawns. Eager...