Word: visconti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...STRANGER. Italian Director Luchino Visconti's film follows the action of Albert Camus' fine novel with hardly a comma missing-and therein lies both its strength and its weakness. The action of the book eventually moves into the mind, and Visconti does not find a cinematic way of translating the shift. Marcello Mastroianni plays the hero suffering from alienation and despair...
...STRANGER. Italian Director Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers) has been fanatically faithful to Albert Camus' fine novel of alienation and despair, even to the point of including a long soliloquy on life, death and the meaninglessness of it all by the hero (Marcello Mastroianni), which mars an otherwise powerful film...
...network of conflicting spatial relationships from the many people in his best-seller-based sagas, and his films work on a level far transcending the dramatic material. From this specialized, perhaps perverse, point-of-view, Hurry Sundown is close to Preminger's best film.
Every frame is dominated by the dizzying North African heat; with blinding sunlight and sweat-drenched bodies, Visconti comes close to prostrating his audience as he builds Meursault's unexpected, meaningless murder of an Arab on the beach. It is stifling, too, in the courtroom where Meursault is condemned, as much for his disengagement from society's proprieties and his refusal to pretend pieties he does not feel as for the crime itself...
...action of the book-and the movie-moves inside his mind. The camera is left staring at Mastroianni while his voice on the sound track soliloquizes on life, death and the meaninglessness of it all. The sequence is faithful to what Camus wrote, but it is a shame that Visconti could not have found a more cinematic way of getting it across in a film whose power otherwise almost matches the book that inspired...