Word: halpern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...burden of enlivening slow patches of the script off the actors' hands, but chose not to, using dull blocking and an entirely static--though lavish--set. The only evidence of a director's hand in the production at all, in fact, is the presence of a pianist (Jeffrey Halpern) on stage before each act, playing show tunes and Gershwin with flair but without much point...
...asking what's wrong. I'd prefer to tell you what I enjoyed about this evening. It's always a pleasure to see one's work performed by enthusiastic actors with a great deal of energy. I thought the young woman who played Lilli (Belle Linda Halpern) showed real promise on the musical stage. Her voice has remarkable range and color, though she use, too much vibrato. Her dramatic timing was also excellent. The same goes for the actor who played Baptista, Katherine's father (Eric Mendelman...
...David Halpern's Hollywood On Trial takes a long, diffuse perspective on the Ten and their times, starting with the thirties and moving in little leaps up to the dissolution of the blacklist in the sixties. The footage of the hearings is glorious because, of course, they were staged by the Committee to look like movies. The best actor of all is a young Ronald Reagan who earnestly looks through his clearframed glasses at the Chairman and summons the words of Jefferson to make his point. ("I guess Jefferson..." a humble pause... "said it best...") Gary Cooper shrugs and grins...
These men, who had written Pride of the Marines, Objective Burma. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Destination Tokyo had now become the enemy themselves. In the Halpern film, only Dalton Trumbo explains the awful terror that came with the subpoena, the process of "getting ready to become nobody." Halpern shows the progressive effect of pressure and time on the writers. They age, dry up, crease and sag--but those with spirit make their physicality irrelevant. The polar two in the film are Trumbo and Edward Dmytryk...
...Halpern's film tries to explain the period, and of course, it does not. It stretches and sprawls and sometimes the interviews just go flat. But it is by far the best work done on the ugly little freak blacklist, and it is hard to imagine anybody attempting to match the ambitious perspective of Hollywood on Trial. It pulls in Herbert Hoover and Zero Mostel. Joseph McCarthy and Walt Disney, and although it doesn't have the footwork some documentaries do, it is an impressive mosaic...