Word: nanook
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...which they are shooting in Cotonou, principal city in the small West African nation of Dahomey. If Guinness' bar attire (left over from a just-finished scene) seemed a little farther out than usual-well, Dahomey itself may be farther out than the location of any movie since Nanook of the North. Financial Frankness. Barred from the film's proper location of Haiti because of the novel's distinct unfriendliness toward Haitian Dictator Francois Duvalier, Comedians' Producer-Director Peter Glenville and his company found a surprisingly exact replica in Dahomey. Cotonou is a jerry-built outcropping...
...Marshall. Robert Flaherty is described in this admirable biography as the archetype of the artist-adventurer: a steel-hewed Irishman who spent the first half of his life exploring the Arctic, a Blake-like visionary who spent the second half inventing the documentary film and producing its early masterworks-Nanook of the North, Moana, Louisiana Story...
...Flaherty was the Blake of cinema, its prodigious primitive. He was the first man of film to demonstrate that the merest reality can inspire the highest art. In arctic desolation he evolved the documentary method and at the corners of the earth produced the early masterworks of the tradition: Nanook of the North, Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story. With the perspective of half a century, the works retain their stature, and the figure of Flaherty is magnified in time. In The Innocent Eye, Biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall depicts Flaherty as an extravagant example of an extravagant type: the artist...
...Nanook bombed in the U.S. but ran for six months in London and Paris, and in 1923 Paramount's Jesse Lasky gave Flaherty $250,000 to make a similar picture about village life in Samoa. Photographically speaking, Moana was the most beautiful movie made until that time-but beauty cut no ice with Paramount. Chopped in half, the film was billboarded as THE LOVE-LIFE OF A SOUTH SEA SIREN. For the next seven years the moneymen hid when they saw Flaherty coming...
...songs of Tony Corbett and Joel Cohen are not potential classics, but some of them, aided by Mayer's lyrics, are corking good. Corbett's title song. "William Had the Words!" had people humming at intermission, and his parody in song of the old musical No, No, Nanook (which features the magnificent ditty "Hark, hark, hark, hark, the call of the arctic") is brilliant...