Word: opus
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...Hallelujah Trail is bigger but not better than any of the recent comedies that are supposed to milk laughs from the sacred cows of the Hollywood western. The sheer bulk of the opus is one clue to its failure. Given a plot with several droll twists, Director John Sturges (The Great Escape, Bad Day at Black Rock) lets his camera roam freely over the Cinerama landscape, too often striving for epic effects when antic effects are needed...
...back hair and brooding mustache, Michelangeli ambled onstage with the baleful nonchalance of a boxer bent on mayhem. Once he settled at the keyboard, his touch was featherweight light, his attack crisp and restrained through Debussy's liquid Images and Beethoven's soaring Sonata in C Major (Opus 2, No. 3). After two encores and a dozen curtain calls, he unconcernedly ambled offstage to a standing ovation. Typically, following his triumph, he repaired last week to the regenerative quietude of a month-long teaching engagement at Siena's Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Untypically, he will return in August...
BEETHOVEN: QUARTET IN A MINOR OPUS 132 (RCA Victor). This intricate work was written 25 years after the septet and sounds a world apart, especially in this crisp, exact performance by the Juilliard String Quartet. Technically, the Juilliard is superb; the pianissimo passages, for example, are feather-light and still warm, but the third movement, the "song of thanksgiving offered to the divinity by a convalescent," sounds curiously reserved...
...Christina Stead (House of All Nations) first published The Man Who Loved Children, a world at war was in no mood to consider the perennial war between men and women. The book sold badly and was soon forgotten. But a slowly enlarging circle of literati insisted that a magnum opus had been overlooked, and the publisher at last consented to a second edition that proves the literati right. The Man Who Loved Children is one of the most truthful and terrifying horror stories ever written about family life...
...gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat," says the Bible (Matthew 7:13). The latest to go in thereat is Producer-Director George Stevens (Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank), lugging along blueprints for this unwieldy magnum opus on the life of Christ, a work begun some five years and $20 million ago under benign auspices. "In creative association" with Poet Carl Sandburg, Stevens and Co-Author James Lee Barrett begat a script based loosely on Fulton Oursler's bestseller, on the Old and New Testament...