Word: sullivane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gilbert & Sullivan (London Films, Lopert) is a thoroughgoing stomp through the old Savoy. Though it is well known that one Gilbert & Sullivan opera is more than most companies can produce successfully, the British team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (State Secret) have undertaken to produce almost all of them-and all at once, in this two-hour film-and to tell the life stories of Gilbert & Sullivan at the same time...
Scarcely a petal of each play is preserved-an air of one, a snatch of another -but the writers of the script (Gilliat worked with Leslie Baily, whose Gilbert & Sullivan Book was a 1952 bestseller) have deftly wired them all together to make a charming, if slightly artificial musical forget-me-not. Some of the charm is due to the spirited stuffiness of the Victorian settings and the muted Technicolor. Best of all, several members of the famed D'Oyly Carte company (Martyn Green, Thomas Round, Gron Davies) give silken-fine performances...
...Arthur Sullivan, Maurice Evans does his usual deft job of playing Maurice Evans-a personage hardly sufficient to hold the stage against the powerful presence of Robert Morley. As W. S. Gilbert, Morley fairly strides out of the frame, like an ancestral portrait from Ruddigore...
Despite its good looks and good music, Gilbert and Sullivan never quite comes together as a rounded piece of entertainment. The script so weakens the true story of the great collaborators that it is blown about like a dead leaf in each gust of song. The real human interest lies in the history of Sullivan's attempts to make himself "a Bach, when he was only...
Both Martin and Sullivan agree that the current beats are all understaffed. "Why on the last watch in the Square there's no one on, and only an occasional prowl car coming through," says Sullivan. "We need 25 more men, and I think we'll eventually get them...