Word: shallow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they are sick, and they are hungry, and bored. Fat, black mamas rearrange clothes inside the shelters, and when they get through with that, they sit outside on boxes and trunks. The view is lousy, too. All they can do is look through the trees and across the shallow water of the Reflecting Pool at the office workers in shirtsleeves...
...telling of their lives that the film fails. Pierre and Andrei are at best only shallow, literal representations of Tolstoy's rich characters. To portray Natasha's giddiness, Savelyeva never walks when she can dash, never smiles when she can give shiny-eyed grins that reduce her to a caricature coquette. Amateurish cutting and arbitrary shifts from color to black and white mutilate the film. Moreover, the dubbing is disastrous: the actors' faces show feelings far more profound than the dull words that cannot quite fit their mouths...
...Although the settings themselves (for which no program credit is provided) are neither beautiful, flexible, nor functional--consisting largely of sliding stair units and walls bearing faded and indifferently rendered Egyptian wall motifs--the use Chapman makes of them is bold and consistent. Given an almost unnaturally broad and shallow stage, he has chosen to arrange almost every scene as a balanced static composition, varied only at moments of true dramatic necessity. The effect seems to me to be entirely intentional, and it works splendidly in the frequent crowd scenes, when the groupings suggest at once the linear composition...
...more than a few of the iconic images which crowd the film: the old King's breath freezing in the chill sunlight of his vast hall, Hotspur's (Norman Rodway) peripatetic motion caught by a camera tracking in tight close-up, the gross Falstaff beside the cruelly emaciated Justice Shallow (Alan Webb), Doll Tearsheet (Jeanne Moreau) demonstrating how a tender and accomplished whore might satisfy an impossibly fat old patron. The Battle of Shrewsbury is simply the finest, truest, ugliest war footage ever shot and edited for a dramatic movie. Welles fills Falstaff with motifs to create visual unities...
...found all across the country-in Chicago (1924's So Big), the Mississippi River (1926's Show Boat), Oklahoma (1929's Cimarron), upstate New York (1941's Saratoga Trunk), Texas (1952's Giant) and Alaska (1958's Ice Palace). Critics sometimes called her shallow; her subjects often found her biting judgments just the reverse (in Texas, in fact, there were mutters of lynching). Her books, Broadway plays and countless short stories, brought her fame and wealth. "Life," she said, "can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself...