Word: wildernesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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According to Auden's Law, most of the plays of Thornton Wilder are a poor source for operatic material: deliberately unsensational, they often deal with lives that are determinedly sensible. But last week audiences in Mannheim, Germany, saw Wilder's one-act play, The Long Christmas Dinner, successfully transformed into opera by that master craftsman of contemporary music-Composer Paul Hindemith...
...Three. A sort of Mack Sennett investigation of the situation in Berlin, conducted with a wham-bam abandon by Director Billy Wilder...
...Three. A sort of Mack Sennett investigation of the situation in Berlin, conducted with a wham-bam abandon by Director Billy Wilder...
...plot, borrowed partly from a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar and partly from a Wilder-Brackett-Lubitsch movie called Ninotchka (1939), is almost as intricate as the famous secret recipe for Coca-Cola-a beverage that, incidentally, benefits in this film from 108 minutes of effervescent and unmitigated schlock. The hero (James Cagney), who heads up the Coca-Cola operation in West Berlin, dreams of a deal with Moscow's Soft Drink Secretariat that will 1) insinuate the pause that refreshes into the Communist way of life, and 2) install him in London as chief of European operations...
...rate them, not for quality, but in terms of smiles-per-hour. In fact, many of the jokes are soggy burps that might well have been planted in the script by a secret agent from Canada Dry. But many more, as usually happens in pictures written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. ("Izzy") Diamond, have edge and temper. Cagney's wife (Arlene Francis): "But she can't stay long. Doesn't school open soon?" Cagney: "In Georgia? You never know." Cagney's ten-year-old son, hopefully, when the boss's daughter has a fainting spell...