Word: dehn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WALTON: THE BEAR (Angel). British Composer William Walton premiered this one-act gem only a year ago. He was fortunate in finding an excellent librettist (an increasingly rare breed of writer) named Paul Dehn, who based his freewheeling lyrics on Chekhov's farce. Walton's eclectic styles are more than equal to the idiotic but entertaining plot about Popova, a widow who so enrages a creditor that he challenges her to a duel, but they suffer the fate of operatic lightning-love and fall into each other's arms. The work is laced with musical and verbal...
...Taming of the Shrew. "We intend to make Shakespeare as successful a screenwriter as Abby Mann." Thus spake Director Franco Zeffirelli last year when he began filming The Taming of the Shrew. The screen credits maintain the mock-the-bard tone: script billing goes to Zeffirelli, Paul Dehn and Suso Checchi D'Amico, with a coy acknowledgment "to William Shakespeare, without whom we would have been at a loss for words." The irreverence in this case is less a shame than a sham. Despite the disclaimer, Zeffirelli has succeeded in mounting the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier...
Scenarist Paul Dehn, who also wrote the script for Spy, this time too often jumps the main track of the tale to lollygag along a branch line, and Director Sidney Lumet (The Group) has either miscast or misdirected some of his principals. Mason and Signoret, however, are pathetically impressive as a couple of mice wandering in a maze designed for rats. And as a whole, the film convincingly elucidates in a modern instance why Dante consigned traitors to the very pit of hell. Le Carre similarly perceives treason as a spiritual attitude underlying the political act. His traitors are liars...
...plot (faithfully reproduced from the John Le Carre novel by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper) is complicated. Spies and counterspies. British agents trying to bump off Communist agents and vice versa. Loyalties are obscured because you don't know who's working for whom; sympathies are initially nonexistant because the good guys are every bit as ruthless as the bad. Control, head of British intelligence, is well done by Cyril Cusack with his tea pots and easy acceptance of Cold War expediencies. He says to Leamas (Burton): "Our policies are peaceful, but our methods can't afford to be less...
...chief pawn in an involuted cold-war plot, will be measured from now on against his full, corrosive performance here. To have read le Carré can only heighten one's relish of Burton's collision with the prickly dialogue supplied by Scenarists Guy Trosper and Paul Dehn...