Word: tourneur
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...Eliot called him "the singular poet with the delightful name." Cyril Tourneur's name is one of the few things known about the Elizabethan dramatist. In an era of prolific playwriting, he produced only two plays that have survived, The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy, and even the dates of his birth and death are blanks. He attained no great popularity among his contemporaries. The sole allusion to Tourneur in an old chronicle sums him up this...
Since the play originally appeared around 1607, Tourneur had had plenty of time to be influenced by Shakespeare. The Revenger's Tragedy shows that genius is not catching. In the way that one speaks of situation comedies, Tourneur's play is a situation tragedy, with its repetitive horrors and villainies lurching unpredictably into farce. Its demonic hero, Vendice (Kenneth Haigh), is bent on revenge without a hindering trace of Hamlet's "pale cast of thought" or the Dane's meditative scruples. Vendice comes onstage fondling the skull of his poisoned mistress. He plays pander...
...Brownlow's material finally convinces us that changes were basically detrimental, at least those resulting from production supervision and over-industrialization. A superb chapter on Producers shows how surprised the autonomous directors were when corporate heads unleashed these "supervisors" on them. Maurice Tourneur, an early film-maker of indescribable importance, refused initially to allow his first Producer on the set. The studio finally explained to him that Producers were a permanent fixture and Tourneur returned immediately to France, never to make another film...
...boyhood-which is what it is. The period and locale come alive in fine sets and props; Actor Hernandez and Dean Stockwell (as the parson's ward) give unusually good performances; the script furnishes some tangy color (e.g., the visit of a brassy medicine show), and Director Jacques Tourneur flavors the corn with the poetic zeal of a French chef...
...such wistful images as a lingering shot of two boys on their backs in a haywagon, rolling along in tree-dappled sunlight, Director Tourneur evokes a full-blown atmosphere of carefree rural living. Equally expert when the film bursts into melodrama, he uses only two graphic shots to concentrate all the impact of a burning-cross visitation by the Klan. When the parson later heads off a lynching by an appeal to the mob's better instincts, the situation is strictly bogus; yet the scene plays with sure effectiveness...