Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...myth of Director Mike Nichols, invulnerable up to now, has been that he could bust a comic rib with an onionskin script, but The Apple Tree is too thin for even his nimble touch. While Barbara Harris is as saucily mocking as ever, it becomes clearer with each performance that she is more of a zany caricaturist and mimic than she is an actress. She can do instant impersonations of people and moods, but except for her 1962 performance in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, she has never developed a character. In the past, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick have written...
...Croft is a kind of moral guardian of the radio show, seeing that nothing in the script offends the proprieties, ethics and decencies of the English home. She looks like a displaced manikin and speaks in tones of liquefied arsenic. Her fraud is that she, too, is a lesbian and has no scruples about luring Childie into ditching Sister George and becoming her private secretary. All she leaves Sister George is an offer to play the part of Clarabelle the Cow in a retch-inspiring kiddie show. At play's end, Sister George sits alone mooing through drunken tears...
...novel, Director John Frankenheimer and Veteran Photographer James Wong Howe manage to give the most improbable doings a look of credible horror. Once Rock appears, though, the spell is shattered, and through no fault of his own. Instead of honestly exploring the ordeal of assuming a second identity, the script subsides for nearly an hour into conventional Hollywood fantasy...
...crazy way to go to Denver, man. He also pretends to be a Swiss shoe clerk, a termite exterminator and an Australian police inspector, meanwhile seducing a wealthy old woman's beautiful companion (Camilla Sparv), who really loves him for reasons never made clear in the script. He is characterized throughout as an alley cat so charmless that one sullied female can recall nothing about him more memorable than: "He wears a truss...
HITCHCOCK: Yes. The set designer comes in very early, because during the course of the writing I want certain things researched. Because if it won't work out then I don't put it in the script. In other words, I get the designer involved in the making as well. So really it's the writer, me, and the designer, all working together in the preparatory planning...