Word: vidor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...builds to the threshold of pain. Yet the film is not imitation Bergman; it is, above all, peculiarly American. Adapting a popular novel by Avery Corman, Benton tells an unpretentious story that might well have served such vintage Hollywood tearjerkers as George Stevens' Penny Serenade and King Vidor's Stella Dallas...
With few exceptions, like the children in King Vidor's The Crowd, and Jackie Cooper in Vidor's The Champ, kids in those days were usually required to unbottle buckets of maple syrup. Think about the death of Rhett Butler's be loved Bonnie Blue in Gone With the Wind. The little actress, Cammie King, is such a vision of hatefulness in her taffeta gowns, ringlets that curl like maypoles and a voice full of squiggles, that one feels less sympathy at her demise than at the death of her pony. The animal is shot for throwing...
...should. When the great director King Vidor made The Champ in 1931, he created a four-handkerchief corker; a fine cast (Wallace Beery, the young Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich) and Vidor's emotional restraint prevented a sugary story from caramelizing. This remake, directed by Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet), is another matter entirely. By miscasting all three major roles, adding 35 minutes to the original film's running time and reaching for cheap effects, the director has gilded a lily and then shredded...
Gilda. Done in 1946 by King Vidor, "Gilda" is the best of the "film noir" style that emphasized the dark side of the American character in the climate of national disillusionment following World War II. The film features Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth and an actor whose name I always forget, who plays a Rio casino owner-cum-international tungsten cartel boss. It revolves around two sinister triangles: one, a quasi-homosexual link between the tungsten boss, the boss's sword-cane, and Glenn Ford (the other, between Rita Hayworth, the tungsten boss (who marries her), and Ford...
...King Vidor said a couple of weeks ago in the Times Sunday Magazine that he was surprised sound lasted back in 1929; after all, directors had made film into a great silent art form. Well, Vidor was wrong, of course, but Fritz Lang's 1923 murder story M. stands in tribute to the visual sweep and eloquence of silent film. Lang and Lubitsch made the German film industry in the 1920's the most technically brilliant and intellectually stimulating of any in the world; Lang's later Hollywood efforts were mostly cliched and dull. The movie stars the young Peter...