Word: visconti
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...perhaps still the best modern novel of alienation and despair. Though Camus steadfastly refused to allow it, or any of his other books, to be made into a movie, his widow finally sold the film rights to Italian Producer Dino De Laurentiis on condition that the director be Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers...
...Visconti has tackled his responsibility with the same fanatical concern for factual accuracy that Richard Brooks demonstrated in making In Cold Blood (TIME, Dec. 22). He had authorities in Algiers rip up a street to lay down trolley tracks that had been there during the period of the story (1938-39), and even ordered a reprinting of cigarette packages to match those sold at the time. Visconti's film of The Stranger follows the action of the novel with hardly a comma missing-and therein lies both its strength and its weakness...
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...
Sandra. "These shadows . . . the sifting of ashes of a dead past." Thus whisper the winds of melancholy around a decaying palazzo in the Tuscan town of Volterra, where Director Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard) installs Claudia Cardinale as resident tragedienne. In Visconti's modern variations on the Electra theme, Claudia struggles with a role that requires her, at times, to slip off the mantle of Greek tragedy and slip into something like a bath towel...
Sandra, though lento-paced and pretentious, does create a bewitching atmosphere of decadence. While the old, ordered world passes into limbo, Visconti savors every detail of a cavernous manse where each drafty, half-lit corridor and every gleaming bit of crystal augurs ill. But finally the decor becomes a bore, and even Visconti's human characters seem used up, lifeless, set into place like figures in a faded tapestry...