Word: vidor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Charles Vidor, 58, Hungarian-born Hollywood director (The Swan, Hans Christian Anderson), who promoted Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford and other stars; of a heart attack; in Vienna...
...with a dagger. The 'assassination attempt flopped all right. Lunging at his quarry, Actor Luis Santana bumped into a blazing brazier, and raced howling across the set, his cloak a flaming torch. Gina was horror-struck; Santana, soon doused, with only minor burns, was badly shaken. Director King Vidor? The cameras had caught the scene, and he decided to rescript slightly for that touch of burning realism...
...entirely to be condemned. The only trouble is that once the team of six writers who "adapted" the book decided to discard the philosophy of Tolstoy as impossible to dramatize, they failed to settle on a point of view of their own. And so they and director King Vidor produced a huge, handsome picture which might be called a historical romance, complete with all the superficial charm and the vacuity that the name implies...
...then War and Peace would rank among the finest pictures ever made, because technically it is superb. Photographed in Vista-Vision on a film that for once neither glares nor blurrs the colors together, the movie displays a seemingly endless array of attractive palaces and costumes. Furthermore, Vidor's staging of the Battle of Borodino, especially a sequence showing the French troops storming a Russian artillery position, includes perhaps the best battle scenes ever filmed...
...Director Vidor, unfortunately, must also deal with an involved story covering many lives and stretching across many years. Twenty hours of film would not be enough to do Tolstoy justice, and Vidor has less than four. The inevitable result is a telescoping of scenes and a hopscotching through the plot that scat ters attention from one leading character to another. The cast speaks in discordant accents, ranging from Cockney to Italian to Middle European to Middlewestern, and some of the most complex of Toltoy's people can only be hinted at: Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) is a gutural swashbuckler...