Word: film
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Once More was completed last July, two months before Actress Kendall's death, at 33, of leukemia. Many of her scenes were shot while she had a high fever. Nevertheless, she gives in her last picture what is possibly her funniest film performance. At one point, while Brynner is chasing her around his den, she peers at him through the strings of a harp, and with the merest curl of the upper lip contrives to suggest that she is a caged and ferocious lioness. At another, bedded with a banging hangover, she suddenly gets a mad glint...
...Stalin's Russia. Enter Comrade Khrushchev, followed by a babble of rumors that tractors were out, humanity was in, and a new generation of genius was about to restore the prestige enjoyed in the '20s by the Communist cinema. Last week, thanks to the recent U.S. -Soviet film-exchange agreement, two of the new Russian films could be seen in the U.S. Genius was not in evidence, but then neither were the tractors...
...Cranes Are Flying (Warner), which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1958, is a much more exciting experience. With the exception of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, it is probably the best Russian movie seen in the U.S. since World...
...free of official interference, and the sense of freedom thrills in every frame. Kalatozov can seldom resist the brilliant angle and the trenchant frame, even when they interrupt the story, and his glorious effects of cutting and lighting are often spectacularly inappropriate. But somehow the vital extravagance of the film engages the spectator and whirls him along in its whirling mood. This mood is personified in Heroine Samoilova, an astonishingly imaginative young actress who is the type of Tolstoy's Natasha-slender, dark, expressive as a flame...
...matters less as a work of art than as a revelation of the modern Russian mood. It adds, for one thing, to the mass of evidence that the nation that leads the world in rocketry is still inspired by the romantic ideals of 19th century "servants' literature." The film also suggests that there has been some relaxation of the puritanical morality of the revolution: the heroine errs, but is forgiven at the fade. And there is even a mild suggestion that people in Russia sometimes get tired of the canned ideas they are continually fed-the party...