Word: villainous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...real villain in the controversy over the morality of Baby Doll is neither Tennessee Williams, who wrote it, nor Elia Kazan, who produced and directed it, nor New York's Cardinal Spellman, who mounted the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral to condemn it. The villains are the advertising men who designed the singularly repulsive poster which decorates, among other things, a whole block of Times Square in Manhattan. While it is the usual practice for publicity men to emphasize sex in every film they promote, this time they have done us a real disservice, for their work is largely...
...actors, in general, make good use of their melodramatic opportunities. Yul Brynner is gloweringly glamorous as the villain. Helen Hayes is effective as the Empress, but her work, like much about this picture, has been scanted by the inept direction of Anatole Litvak. Director Litvak made his worst mistake in connection with Ingrid Bergman. Her acting is competent, but only now and then toward the end of the picture, almost as if by accident, can the moviegoer see what he probably will want most of all to see on the screen: the fact that, seven years after her abdication...
...business has changed from the freebooting days of the tycoon. What fiction now needs, suggests Chase Manhattan Bank Economist Robert A. Kavesh in a survey of current business fiction, is a "greater focus on the corporation itself and more particularly on the executives who govern collectively. No longer the villain of the piece, the businessman may appear in a variety of roles more adequately reflecting the range and variety of personalities that exist in the business world...
Thus, Oliver Cromwell, the hero to so many English historians, is Churchill's villain. He considers the Lord Protector− who, invoking God's will, ordered 3,000 men put to the sword in one day-a warning to all those who would be willing to kill others in order to improve the survivors. Says Churchill: "A school grew up to gape in awe and some in furtive admiration at these savage times . . . The twentieth century has sharply recalled its intellectuals from such vain indulgences...
...course, the villain gets his just deserts, and that ain't razzberries, but for some incomprehensible reason the moviemakers felt called upon to wail at his wake. "He was the most hated man on earth," says Yvonne, in hushed, almost reverent tones. "But he could have been one of the great men in history. He was a genius." Which is rather like praising a man-eating shark for being Best of Breed...