Word: walde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their script Jerry Wald and Michael Curtiz, producer and director respectively, have adapted an incident from Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not." They have sacrificed nothing in the transition: the dialogue retains all of Hemingway's sharpness, and his simple, compact plot is still as clear and as interesting as ever...
...Jerry Wald and Charles K. Feldman have welded the play's fragments into a literal, realistic continuity, with only a gesture or two in the direction of the original atmosphere. As a result, the story's poignancy and humor are all but swallowed up in a drab, tedious film that even a set of good characterizations cannot redeem...
Producer Jerry (Johnny Belinda) Wald and Scripter Ranald MacDougall have taken plenty of liberties, but that should not offend Hemingway fans who recognize that To Have and Have Not is one of the master's lesser works. The script reshuffles characters and incidents, creates new ones, even switches locales (from the Florida keys and Cuba to the California coast and Mexico). In reshaping the novel, it softens some cutting edges. But the story is still tough, violent and essentially true to the book's central figure: a rugged individualist, desperately down on his luck...
...Wald and Krasna were already bubbling with plans and projects. With Hughes's approval, they were going to start a profit-sharing system for top-rank stars, writers and producers, boasted that they would assemble "under one roof, the smartest people since the Greeks." They planned to hire a corps of the nation's top newsmen to scour the world for original story material. Their films would cover the whole scale from social drama (Country Club, a study of Midwest manners & morals) to ribald comedy (Mother Knows Best, a collection of "clean-dirty stories" with Mae West...
There was really not much more that any Hollywood producer could ask for. Crowed the fast-talking Jerry Wald: "We'll have even more autonomy than Zanuck...