Word: yarn
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...Yearling. An expensive and elaborate version, in eye-popping Technicolor, of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' simple yarn about the Florida scrub country (TIME...
Heroes in war novels usually wear an enlisted man's stripes, sometimes bars, rarely anything as awesome as an oak leaf. But the hero of this fast-moving, funny, occasionally angry yarn wears a general's star. Earnest, hard-working Brigadier General K. C. Dennis, who commands the 5th U.S. Bombardment Division, is worried about a new super-secret jet plane which the Nazis are about to put into production. He knows where its factories are hidden, also that his 6-175 could blast them sky-high were they given a chance. But the factories are deep inside...
Despite its pretensions and a dragging opening scene, it is an exciting film, because it boldly experiments in both subject and treatment. It tackles a difficult, fantastic yarn and spins it out with humor and cinematic skill. The sets are clever; direction and photography are first-rate. With the greatest of ease, the story swings back & forth between a pearly-monotone heaven and a dazzling, Technicolored earth. But it bites off too big a hunk and insists on chewing it all. In a clumsy flirtation with the U.S. box office, its makers threw in some boring heavenly discourses on Anglo...
...about as close as the Johnston Office will permit in letting Merle Oberon get away with murder. Adapted from a musty Robert Hichens novel called Bella Donna (forerunner of the stories with spiced-up Mediterranean settings that used to run in Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine), the turgid old yarn has been tried three times before in the movies. The verdict, in spite of its fine feathers, stylish production and highfalutin misbehavior, is guilty-too sluggish...
Based on fact, The Overlanders is a hard-riding yarn about a drover who refused to shoot 1,000 head of cattle, decided to "overland" them across 1,600 miles of forbidding mountains and desert. The storytelling, acting and incidental romancing are not quite up to Hollywood Standards. But the jagged, weirdly beautiful landscapes are novel and interesting...