Word: claptrap
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...good measure. In the end, of course, she goes back to the convent, and at this point it becomes painfully apparent that the moviemakers intend, even at the risk of sacrilege, to have their unleavened bread and eat it too. But after more than two hours of claptrap, audiences will probably be too tired to care, except about just one thing: Will Miracle never cease...
...putting down the Moscow-First crowd, Gomulka gave no encouragement to those Poles who urge more and more freedom, more and more separation from Russia. Denouncing the "intellectual nonsense of political romanticists," he faithfully echoed all the claptrap of Russian foreign policy. But this orthodoxy gave him Moscow's support for a highly unorthodox domestic regime. Delegates from other Communist nations found themselves in the freest society behind the Iron Curtain, where the press still takes liberties (though less and less); where talk is comparatively free; where the secret police are all but gone, and the Roman Catholic Church...
Infidelity is a tiresome and out-of-joint job about some kind of moral dilemma, involving the death of a bicycle rider. The hero and heroine, obviously big stars in their country from the footage wasted on their faces, are man and mistress. There's a lot of claptrap about living in an age with too many symbols, returning to the old integrity of student days, etc. Of course at the end there comes the uncomfortably awaited Spanish Irony--the heroine is run off the road by the eternal bicycle rider. If you want to go to the seven thirty...
...brute and his half-wit mistress are subhuman, because inarticulate. This it is almost to be expected that a movie which details their adventures truthfully and without claptrap should quickly become wearisome. This is pointed up by the brief appearance of the tightrope walker, who is gloriously articulate. La Strada takes on its fullest life when he is onscreen. He is like a nimble, lively Orpheus in a hell of groping and grunting, and Richard Basehart plays him brilliantly. Signor Fellini has created one character of un-crippled humanity, and for a few scenes has matter worthy of the scrupulous...
...wouldn't be hard to guess that Ritchard also directed, since he has blocked himself downstage and as the locus of attention all the time, even when he should not be front and center. But it's a neat job of direction. There is some claptrap in the script, trying to impute deeper meanings to a few of the characters, but it's not bothersome. Also a lot of the jazzy repartee reminds one of an old Montgomery-Lombard movie...