Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Capra (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) needed this picture like-unless, after an eight-year absence from moviemaking, it was only money he was after. The story about a Jewish family has undergone nearly every possible treatment by Author Arnold Schulman (one-act play, TV script, a novel, two full-length plays, one of which made Broadway) except maybe a synopsis baked inside a Chinese fortune cookie...
...apoplectic brother (Edward G. Robinson), a rich New York merchant ("I haven't had a vacation in 24 years and I'm proud of it!"). Brother and his wife (Thelma Ritter) try to fix him up with a nice widow (Eleanor Parker). The rest of the script is farced and furious until, at picture's end, Brother stops pinching pennies, Frankie stops pinching the girl upstairs, and the whole family, including the widow, fade out, frolicking in the sand...
...money in the '30s and made a comeback in 1944. His film biography is heavy with heroics and sentimentality, but Satchmo is almost worth the price of admission. At 59, he still grins, gravels, and blasts away on the trumpet with enormous energy. And Comedian Kaye, whenever the script gives him a chance, does mimic wonders to fatten up a part that is really from hunger...
Many things in this script tax to the umost the oft-stated "willing suspension of disbelief" that every playgoer is supposed to bring with him into a theatre. Shakespeare was never primarily concerned with story line, anyway; he was more interested in character than in plot. For All's Well he just snapped up a Boccaccio tale from a secondary source, complete with the trite gimmick of identification of rings. But he failed to expend the necessary effort on characteriaztion as well. Pascal once said, "Every author has a meaning in which all the contradictory passages agree...
...ever being allowed simply to mean, to communicate, to convey their propositional sense: it is the theatre's immemorial sin against the writer. As a result, not only was the audience deprived of the exciting display of Betti's dialectical fireworks, but the emotional climaxes which are in the script largely failed to come off because the air was already so thickly clogged with gratuitous passion...