Word: selznicks
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Since You Went Away (Selznick-United Artists). The duck that hatched a swan was lucky compared to David Oliver Selznick. He hatched Gone With the Wind and has been trying to hatch another ever since. Last week he punctuated four pictureless years* with Since You Went Away, a marathon of home-front genre-filming. Sure enough, it was no Gone With the Wind. The Wind blew for four solid hours; Went goes on for ten minutes short of three. The Wind cost $4,000,000 to make; Went, a mere $2,400,000. The Wind was photographed in some...
...Selznick Touch. What makes Since You Went Away sure-fire is in part its homely subject matter, which has never before been so earnestly tackled in a film, in part its all-star acting (everybody registers with all his might, down to Lionel Barrymore's few seconds as a preacher and Newcomer Guy Madison's brief, effective appearance as a sailor), most of all David Selznick's extremely astute screen play and production...
...Selznick has given Claudette Colbert the richest, biggest role of her career. She rewards him consistently with smooth Hollywood formula acting, and sometimes-especially in collaboration with Mr. Gotten-with flashes of acting that are warmer and more mature. He has brought his newest find, Jennifer (The Song of Bernadette) Jones out of the cloister and made her an All-American girl. She rewards him with a nervous, carefully studied, somewhat overintense performance. Selznick placed a big bet on Shirley Temple's comeback and she pays off enchantingly as a dogged, sensitive, practical little girl with a talent...
Yard-Wide Americanism. Though idealized, the Selznick characterizations are authentic to a degree seldom achieved in Hollywood. When a high-school graduating class sings America the Beautiful, the voices are touchingly inchoate, the singers' faces as stolidly reverent, and the shot of the Lincoln statue which begins the song and the meowing cat which ends it, are a deft, valid blend of showmanship, humor and yard-wide Americanism. The wounded men in Since You Went Away really look wounded, for almost the first time in a U.S. fiction war film. There are scores of such evidences of a smart...
...Delegate Ruth Buchanan, a Glendale housewife, spoke of his "duty to the nation." The words became more heated. There were mutterings that Warren was being a traitor to his Party, and cutting his political throat as well. A freshman delegate, burly, forthright Movie Producer David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Since You Went Away), stopped such talk. Said he: "Who are we to question our . . . Governor's decision? He's just as patriotic as any man in this room." At the end, Governor Warren still stood fast. The meeting adjourned...