Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1950
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Borrowing from his one-act play, Orpheus (1926) and his surrealist film, Blood of a Poet (1933), Jack-of-All-Arts Cocteau has written and directed a modern version of the legend in which Orpheus charms the gods into returning his dead wife, Eurydice, to life. As Cocteau has it, Orpheus (Jean Marais) is a celebrated poet and national hero who falls in love with a satellite of death in the shape of a beautiful princess (Maria Casares). The princess covets Orpheus, takes Eurydice (Maria Dea) before her time. Confused by his love for both women, the poet journeys...
What does it all mean? "Don't try to understand," the princess tells one of her victims, and Cocteau echoes her in an "explanation" that is not much more enlightening than his movie. Orpheus is no allegory, he says, but simply an attempt to touch entertainingly in film metaphor on a scrambled collection of such themes as free will, inspiration and the poet's preoccupation with death. What the movie does with these themes is as elusive and disjointed as a half-remembered dream...
Poet Cocteau is nonetheless a clever, imaginative dreamer and a skilled film craftsman. With the help of Georges Auric's brilliantly appropriate music and some talented, attractive players, his movie never fails to be dramatic and provocative, or to keep the audience guessing just what will happen next. Those who try to get to the bottom of it all may conclude that Cocteau's waters are not so deep as they are muddy, but the ripples are something...
...When the village priest forces a compromise that will give Fonse the orchard after Jofroi dies, the old man announces that he will commit suicide to put his death on Fonse's conscience. After some 30 suicide attempts, he intimidates Fonse into a sickbed. Though Pagnol's film technique is static, his grasp of character and locale makes for a human film that is, by turns, uproarious and more than a little touching...
...Miracle (1948), Rossellini's last movie with Anna Magnani, is a curiously spotty film with an impressive performance by its fiery star and glimpses of the director at his raw, powerful best. It tells of a demented peasant woman who mistakes a strange passerby for a vision of St. Joseph. He sits silently while she babbles and drinks his wine until she falls into a stupor. When she finds herself pregnant, she is fanatically certain that she has been chosen for a holy birth. Scorned and humiliated by the villagers, thrown out of her cliff-dwelling by a grotesque...