Word: maurier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...movie is pretty straightforward science fiction with a gloss of social commentary thrown in. This could have been all right: Roeg reworked similarly conventional Daphne du Maurier material into his best movie, Don't Look Now. The Man Who Fell to Earth does not have the personal intensity of the earlier movie nor its daring. Sensing this, perhaps, Roeg and Screenwriter Paul Mayersberg have weighted the slender narrative down with more ideas than it can support: about family structures within different social frameworks and the destruction of innocence by civilization (both explored in Walkabout); about shifting identities and sexual...
...details amassed are awesome. The reader will learn that streetcars in Arnhem were pale yellow; that Lieut. General Frederick Browning, deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army (and husband of Novelist Daphne du Maurier), wore spotless gray kid gloves and sat on an empty beer crate as his glider took him into battle. Nor does Ryan fail to mention the name of the beer (Worthington)-just as he identifies the typewriter (Olivetti) being tapped by a then U.P. correspondent named Walter Cronkite. Random, trivial, even compulsive, Ryan's facts eventually justify themselves as a fragmented tableau of that...
That's the big problem: that the film finally has too little faith in its own second sight and comes up with a real, plot-line explanation that is not spiritual but superstitious. That's really the fault of the Daphne du Maurier story from which the film is taken, but it's all the more disturbing because it reminds us how big the gap is between the best film technique and the best film content, a desert where the best technical directors--Bertolucci or Stanley Kubrick--have often gotten caught with nothing to say, needing direction themselves. I just...
Last week, I began a plug for Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, which is playing first-run in Boston, but it was cut short for lack of space. This film takes a simple Daphne du Maurier story and raises it above its original status as a thriller, achieving a level of visual drama rarely encountered in any film. This is a film of exceedingly dramatic imagery and psychological complexity. The story line is, at times, almost non-verbal, because the dialogue is scant and simple and because the images are photographed and edited with such finesse that most...
...film is being billed as "Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now," but a reading of the Du Maurier story from which the adaptation has been made makes one appreciate Roeg and Screenwriters Scott and Bryant all the more. Film and story share certain basic elements of plot and an ending of cruel surprise. The story is detached, almost cursory. Roeg and his collaborators have constructed an intricate, intense speculation about levels of perception and reality. Thanks also to the superb performances of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, Don't Look Now has in abundance what...