Word: yarns
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Reminiscent in story and treatment of Stromboli (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950), Volcano is a far better film.* Against the island's rough backdrop, the yarn's primitive passions do not seem particularly excessive or out of place. Director William (Salome) Dieterle has made good use of Vulcano's sun-baked terrain, rocky mountainsides, bleak and barren vistas. Blending a documentary style with the blood & thunder, he has turned out some notable scenes: a raw, vivid tuna-fishing sequence, a scene of island women toiling in the cruel pumice mines, a colorful festival procession on nearby Lipari...
...small part of the industrial empire he has built. Starting in 1926 with two family woolen plants and a few hundred workers, he added five factories, built employment to 13,200, working 1,800 looms and 80,000 spindles. His factories last year spun out 23 million lbs. of yarn and about 14 million yards of woven cloth. Among Marzotto's other enterprises: a marble-producing plant, a sugar factory, a 6,177-acre model estate on the Adriatic in northern Italy at Portogruaro, equipped with 75 tractors and a small tanker which chugs up irrigation canals firing broadsides...
Some of the other sequences are much better. Envy, adapted by Director Roberto Rossellini from a Colette story, is the intriguing yarn of a newlywed wife, who is jealous of her husband's affection for his pet cat. Pride, directed by Claude (Devil in the Flesh) Autant-Lara, is a mordant study of an impoverished, aristocratic mother and daughter (well played by Franchise Rosay and Michele Morgan). The best episode is Gluttony, a Rabelaisian sketch written and directed by Carlo Rim, about a handsome doctor, who seeks shelter during a storm in the home of a peasant. There...
...Simenon novel has lost not only its original title but also much of its point. The book, in examining human frailty under stress, was an incisive study of abnormal psychology. Claude Rains's stiff performance and some thoroughly normal moviemaking turn the picture into a routine chase yarn...
...Dark (Columbia) is photographed in Columbia's own 3-D process (also requiring Polaroid glasses). It is a black & white cops & robbers yarn about a criminal (Edmond O'Brien) who, as a result of a brain operation (prefrontal lobotomy), forgets where he has stashed away the $130,000 take from a payroll robbery. Like House of Wax, the movie seems tireless in depicting objects jumping out at the audience: surgical instruments, a car, a bird, a spider. In fact, just about everything seems to come out at the moviegoer except a good movie...