Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...agreed to do the script himself. James Mason was cast as obsessive old Humbert Humbert, with Sue Lyon, then 14, in the title role of the stepdaughter who seduced him. Everybody said the adaptation could not be done, and they were right. But the pallid, bowdlerized film did gross about 21 times its $1,900,000 cost...
...what about a cast? Producer Twain thought, rightly (after the film), that James Mason was wrong for Humbert. Richard Burton was an early choice, but after one musical (Lerner's Camelof), Burton decided: "I have no desire to repeat this fascinating but exacting experiment." In his place will go John Neville, 45, a first-rank British actor. "When I was first approached," he admits, "my feeling was that I didn't see how it could be done with taste...
Diagnosis: Love Story. There's a lot of it going around. Nearly 418,000 hardcover copies, for one thing. Plus 4,350,000 copies of a 95? version−the largest paperback first edition in history.* Plus the film, wrapped in glittering Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal, just in time for holiday giving...
What Ritt does do besides give the film's supporting acting a derivative panache is make Jefferson a lot more angry than he was on the stage. And he achieves this simply by intelligent use of what has become a hackneyed editing cover-up-the reaction shot. James Earl Jones knows what Johnson was all about; if the boxer learned to resent most white men, he also pitied his black mammy and scorned the life she led. Ritt plugged in Jones' knowing smirk enough times to keep me some-what interested in the overheated proceedings...
Ultimately, the film is worth seeing, but only for the events it portrays. It is not an achieved work on any level; throughout the play, and particularly during an obligatory Odetsian family scene, I was reminded of a hilarious line once spoken seriously in a late Odets play: "Half-baked idealism is the peritonitis of the soul." Odets himself knew that he was dissipated and corrupted when he wrote that line, having lost his Depression radicalism somewhere between World War II and Hollywood. Sackler, however, tries to effect that which he never possessed; and Ritt, himself far removed from...