Word: starke
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...country's most promising young painters. With even more ambiguous symbolism than that which characterized his last exhibition (TIME, Feb. 21), Koerner had painted a girl hauled from the ocean while an uncurious crowd fished from the dock above. Koerner's oil was as stark as a tabloid photo, and more disturbing. Was the Girl a successful channel swimmer, or an unsuccessful suicide? The painting offered no clue...
Scripter-Director-Producer Robert Rossen's efforts to keep Stark from being a facsimile of the late Huey Long often turn the character into a colorless man who lacks the political charm of a people's favorite and looks like a cross between a schoolteacher and a gangster. But when Actor Crawford is allowed to swing around in the role, he has some fine scenes-notably, the seedy politico resting off a nightlong drunk in a playground swing, gesturing the children to go off and leave him alone...
...have borrowed from the modern Italian directors have given the movie vitality and power. Since it was shot outdoors in all sorts of weather, the film credibly suggests the passing of time simply because no two scenes show the same sky or lighting. The camera, often threading through Stark's career like a fond mamma looking for her child in a crowd, turns up all kinds of unpredictable and realistic touches. Occasionally, Director Rossen plunges spiritedly into a scene as though, in the Rossellini manner, he were making up the script as he went along...
Interesting acting job: Mercedes Mc-Cambridge, as Stark's hard-boiled assistant, puts a snarl and growl into her radio-trained voice, spreading a small bonfire through her scenes and stealing them...
...away from Hollywood's familiar faces, Scripter-Director-Producer Robert Rossen filmed most of his picture in Stockton, Calif, (pop. 66,000), casting townsfolk in all but the principal roles. He used a railroad brakeman as Pa Stark, the city's sheriff as the sheriff, a local preacher as the preacher. In the big crowd scene just before Willie Stark's assassination, he turned four cameras loose at once on Stockton's non-professional extras to get their unrehearsed reactions to Crawford's speech...