Word: technicolorful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tales of Hoffmann (London Films; Lopert) works hard to arrange the happy marriage of opera and movies that has always eluded cinematic matchmakers. It is a ceremonious attempt, two hours and 18 minutes long, dripping with Technicolor, crowded with talented performers and bearing the stamp of Britain's producing-directing-scripting team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose The Red Shoes turned many a moviegoer into a ballet fan. But Tales of Hoffmann is not likely to win many new converts to opera...
...Strauss' opera. In it most of the virtues and vices of "The Marriage of Figaro" are reversed. There is little of Strauss' music and a lot of good acting. The orange-tinted film is the most unusual part of the movie. If it's Germany's answer to glorious Technicolor, Hollywood has nothing to worry about in that department...
Jacques Offenbach himself labeled his "Tales of Hoffmann" a "fantastic opera," and the London Films adaptation is just that. The Technicolor screenplay displays all of the lavishness and sensuality that the libretto and score imply. The result may surprise the unwary moviegoer, and it may even irritate him a little. For that reason it is important to remember that the movie, like the opera, is intended to be "fantastic...
...series of technicolor flashbacks, "North Forty" tells the occasionally exciting, occasionally plodding story of the resistance of an isolated band of Wyoming sheep ranchers to the usurpation of their grazing land for a Navajo reservation...
...great deal by a delightfully pastoral musical score by Bonar Gillis. The acting, unfortunately, is less competent. Jane Cruikshank plays the Snopes daughter with a sheepish grin, while Basil Mange is never convincing as the anthropologist-congressman who finally settles the inter-racial strife. "North Forty's" technicolor sheep are wonderfuly convincing, however, and they leave the moviegoer with a true sensation of the Old West...