Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...film makers stay eight miles from location in the mining town of Roros, in a hotel that has a sort of elementary ski-lodge comfort. But Roros (pop. 3,200) offers lamentably few distractions-and even they are not particularly accessible. "If her father answers," a young actor explains to the hotel operator, "he doesn't speak any English, so would you please ask him if she's in?" The cast passes the time devising new ways of getting six or eight layers of clothing beneath the tattered costumes for the next day's shooting. The Times...
Since shooting began two months ago, the temperature has rarely risen above minus-five degrees, and more often it hovers a good ten or 15 degrees below that. The camera is equipped with arctic oil and a special heating element beneath the motor, neither of which keeps the film from going brittle and breaking periodically. The sound man has been forced to wrap his microphone in a woman's stocking to soften the noise of the wind that howls across the snow. In one scene that required going without gloves, Tom Courtenay, who stars as Ivan (and uses...
Little Respite. Courtenay, whose previous film roles include the young revolutionary in Doctor Zhivago, prepared to play Ivan by having the crowns of two teeth removed, leaving only gold stumps. For a man who has had no dental attention for at least eight years, "anything less would look phony," he explains. He also dieted 7 lbs. from his 145-lb. frame. "You can't really act in this." Before one scene in which Ivan eats, Courtenay starved himself a day so that he could "concentrate on-camera as if it really were my only food for a long time...
...dialogue of Start the Revolution Without Me oscillates between satire of late Chateaubriand and early Coward. Such deliberate flatulence and obvious double-entendres make for bright, brittle repartee but also a total lack of focus. The film first spoofs Fairbanks-Flynn epics. Then it attempts to satirize Byzantine court intrigue and ends in boudoir farce. In his overzealous attempt to create rococo madness, Producer-Director Bud Yorkin ignores comic economy. Orson Welles' opening narration is gratuitous, and his appearance at the end creates an anticlimax that almost guillotines the movie...
Perfumed Fringes. Still, this is one French Revolution that is too much fun for anyone to lose his head over critical objections. The film's condemned premise is that the revolution could have been averted. The Duke de Sisi of Corsica and a bumptious farmer have their respective sets of twin boys mixed up by. a harried doctor. One unmatched pair (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland) become the murderous, exquisitely aberrant "Corsican Brothers," existing on the perfumed fringes of the aristocracy. The other two (also Wilder and Sutherland) grow up to be swinish revolutionary hangers...