Word: yordan
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Fortunately. Bronston's bust enjoys one solid virtue: a script precisely organized and competently prosed by Playwright Philip (Anna Lucasta) Yordan. who has often quite sensitively reconciled the grandeurs of the King James version with the need for a fresh, contemporary tone. After noisily establishing the Romans in Palestine. Scenarist Yordan moves swiftly and synoptically through the Gospels: The Nativity, The Flight into Egypt. The Massacre of the Innocents; Christ's boyhood, baptism and temptation in the desert; Salome's Dance and the murder of John the Baptist; the Sermon on the Mount, the triumphal procession...
...inaccurate," she adds: "Christ is there as a physical presence, but His spirit is absent . . . There is not the slightest possibility that anyone will derive from the film any meaningful insight into what Christ's life and sufferings signify for us ... It is obvious that Bronston, Ray and Yordan have no opinion on the subject of Christ, except that He is a hot box-office property...
Anna Lucasta (Longridge; United Artists), in the course of its on-again, off-again success story, has suffered more color changes than a traffic light. As first written, back in 1936, Anna was a backstreets melodrama in which Playwright Philip Yordan rummaged among some white trash in a small town. The principal characters were poor Poles, and the heroine was described by one playgoer as "a sort of squarehead Camille." When the play, as written, failed to get a Broadway opening, Playwright Yordan remaindered the rights to the American Negro Theater. The white trash became black trash, and caught fire...
Naturally, Ambler's villains aren't getting their orders from Berlin this time. With his usual sound grasp of regional realities, he wraps his story around the "treason" trial of a liberal politician. Why have the Reds gone after Yordan Delt-chev in the first place? And why have they thrown such fantastic charges at him? Ambler thrusts his British journalist hero, Foster, into the thick of things to ask those questions, then leads him a chase to the answers. Foster trips over a corpse almost as soon as he begins to poke around...
Anna Lucasta (Security Pictures; Columbia) suffers from a piece of inspired miscasting. Originally written by Philip Yordan as the story of a Pennsylvania Polish family, the play became a resounding Broadway hit five years ago after it had been adapted for an all-Negro cast by Producer Harry Wagstaff Gribble. The part of Anna, a generous, warmhearted girl gone wrong, was played by Hilda Simms, a talented actress with a superbly natural stage presence. The movie, not illogically, was based on the first script, with Yordan as producer. But Anna's earthy role was turned over to Paulette Goddard...