Word: wyss
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hell out of this mess!" is a south sea island. Be it the Napoleonic cra when the book "Swiss Family Robinson" was written or the Hitlerian cra when Hollywood put it on celluloid, the story still holds good. True, it creaks in sports. The more lurid parts of Wyss's work had to be soft-pedaled and even then the final script was bogged down with verbiage as thick as the tropical vegetation. But such vivid scenes as the hurricane, the landing, the building of the tree house are still there. The fascinating escapism of the whole idea carries...
When the scripting team of Gene Towne and Graham Baker announced that it would film Swiss Family Robinson as its first fling at producing, story-starved Hollywood gasped with admiration, wondered why Johann Rudolf Wyss's century-old best-seller had been overlooked so long. The wonder has abated. Even versatile Gene Towne is hard put to it to make the uneventful life of Eden entertaining for 93 minutes. He is equally hard-pressed to keep the book's romantic inspirations from seeming merely grotesque when viewed by the literal lens of a camera. A tame ostrich (apocryphally...