Word: focus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Henry V was all simple, engaging action, and Olivier gave it a clarion confidence and sweetness. Hamlet is action in near-paralysis, a play of subtle and ambiguous thought and of even subtler emotions. Olivier's main concern has been to keep these subtleties in focus, to eliminate everything that might possibly distract from the power and meaning of the language. He has stripped the play and his production to the essentials. In the process, he has also stripped away a few of the essentials. But on the whole, this is a sternly beautiful job, densely and delicately worked...
...film is black & white, not Technicolor; color feeds the senses and cloys the mind, and this is not a poem of sensuousness, but of sensibility. There is something approaching, if not quite achieving, absolute depth of focus. There is no pageantry and no ornament; the great, lost creatures of the poem move within skull-stark El-sinore-like thoughts and the treacherous shadows of thoughts. (Roger Purse's sets, as nobly severe and useful as the inside of a gigantic cello, are the steadiest beauty in the film. Next best: the finely calculated movement and disposal of the speakers...
Orator Fosdick, no scientist himself, tried hard to be optimistic: ". . . This telescope can furnish our stricken society with some measure of healing perspective. This great new window to the stars will bring . . . into fresh focus the mystery of the universe, its order, its beauty, its power. ... Adrift in a cosmos whose shores he cannot even imagine, man spends his energies in fighting with his fellow man over issues which a single look through this telescope would show to be utterly inconsequential...
Berlin Express (RKO Radio), which RKO shot mostly in Germany, is really two movies-one in the background, the other in the foreground. The background is an album of postwar Germany: a series of malignantly beautiful photographs of rubbled cities, taken with a depth of focus that clarifies the fear in every handful of dust. Unfortunately, the view of this film is frequently obstructed by the one in front of it, which has a certain frightful clarity of its own. It concerns an American (Robert Ryan), a Briton, a Frenchman and a Russian who unite to rescue a famous advocate...
...Hooperating. A second attempt (1946) made Judy into such an unpleasant young monster that listeners stopped listening. "After all," sputters Author Benson in recollection, "Junior Miss Judy Graves is a nice little girl-a pest, but a nice pest. . ." The new Junior Miss is neither overweight nor out of focus, and her first Hooperating, last week, was a healthy...