Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...film employs a fashionable conceit: behind their separate training and tradition, it claims, both captains are existential twins. Balderdash. The very casting works against the theme. Griem conveys a zeal that has crystallized into fanaticism. As for Keith, he can never adopt any posture for long without questioning it. His ironic underplay is, in fact, the strength of the drama. Even with lesser actors, Director Lament Johnson could have provided a crisp, driving movie. With this cast, The McKenzie Break deserves far better than its current saturation booking...
...sound track also gives itself airs -usually mock Bach, which cannot let the cast alone. Even when Cromwell sees his dead son, killed in civil war, the music interrupts to shatter one of the film's few poignant moments. Cromwell squanders most of its energy on background and battle. The gathering of legislators is truly a parliament of fowls, with the Earl of Manchester (Robert Morley) as a peacock of surpassing foppishness. The engagements between the Royalists and the Roundheads are conveyed with lapidary detail, down to the last cavalryman...
Such work is the triumph of the technical adviser, not the film maker. The essences of conscience and character are left unfilled. Cromwell ends with a fatuous paragraph saluting Oliver's great contributions to democratic government. It never mentions that two years after his death, the Lord Protector's bones were dug up and hanged at Tyburn. No one knows precisely where Cromwell's remains now lie, and it is vain to search for any vestige of the man in the film that bears his name...
...hostile, jeering crowd filled up even the standing room in 2 Divinity Ave, yesterday, to see an NROTC-sponsored showing of a movie prepared by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film. "Operation Abolition," shows "communist-inspired" students demonstrating last May against the Committee's San Francisco hearings. Its aim is to counteract the recent movement among certain liberal groups to abolish the Committee...
...this week's drill for them) sat in a body in the front section of the auditorium. They were much more subdued than the civilian" rear sections, which kept up a steady fire of laughter, hisses and cheers for the demonstrating students. At no time, however, was the film inaudible, and there were no incidents of violence...