Word: celluloid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this sea of celluloid, a masterful director, William (Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives') Wyler, has fished a whale of a picture, the biggest and the best of Hollywood's super-spectacles. The story of Ben-Hur is reasonably faithful to the general's stirring "Tale of the Christ." Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a rich Jew born about the same time as Christ, falls out with his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), commander of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, who demands that Ben-Hur inform against other Jewish patriots. When Ben-Hur refuses...
...Lady & Barbershop Quartet. How could a show, blended with such fine old period pieces as a player piano, a sputtering mayor, a fat lady who dances, a plain-Jane librarian-even a redheaded lisping boy and a celluloid-dickeyed barbershop quartet-make the grade on coldhearted Broadway? Talent is only part of the answer. Many an able combination of stage talent has been hooted off the boards on opening night. In this case, there happened to be a just-right blending of first-rate talents...
...catch its hackle-raising horrors, Twentieth Century searched around Europe last spring, out of a ten-mile tangle of celluloid salvaged 2,400 evocative feet, garnished it with an equally evocative script by Emmet John Hughes, author of Report from Spain (and now chief of TIME-LIFE'S foreign correspondents). There were some coruscant scenes: crying, cursing Madrileños "running faster, faster along the very edge of the abyss," truncheon-wielding cops beating them back; women and children being evacuated under heavy air bombardment, their life's possessions tied in burlap on their backs, or black coffins...
...celluloid rubble of Novelist Hayes's Hollywood ("to see or be seen ... to eat or be eaten") seems unreal. And his people, though carefully and competently labeled, are also carefully unexplored, as if he were afraid that the characters, if given life, would twist out of control. But Hayes is tellingly accurate about the emotions of bored bed partners who do not even 'like each other, and sometimes eloquent about the vacant longings of pretty, light-dazzled girls: "If they expected her to resist, or any of the girls like her, then it would have been wiser...
...which started in the U.S. in 1910 and by now, except for Paramount's stubbornly locked vaults, have been raked by the networks. Ironically, it is TV itself that has put most of the newsreels out of business and thereby shut off one source for future historians in celluloid. The networks are now salting away their own voluminous news film against the day when a show like Twenty-First Century may want to picture the quaint old U.S. at the dawn of the space...