Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Secure behind an excellent European reputation and happily outside the smothering bosom of Hollywood's plot cartel, J. Arthur Rank has shunned customary procedure in his totally unorthodox presentation of a documentary film. Centered around the historic migration of Australian cattle herds to escape a threatened Japanese invasion, "The Overlanders" becomes experimental by American standards in its complete emphasis on realism without the added appeal of ersatz excitement. Mr. Rank has successfully produced an absorbing, plausible movie and neatly avoids treading on the worn-down heels of contemporary horse operas...
Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main, as decayed neighbors, are worked for a good deal of the great deal they are worth. The plot also bears down hard on MacMurray's interest (invented for the screen) in a rich lady farmer (Louise Allbritton) who drives a station wagon. It ends, happily, as soon as Miss Colbert has battled nature just long & hard enough to harvest her first baby...
Armed with the simplest of plots and three extremely capable actors, Zoltan Korda has transformed Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" into a first-rate motion picture. While the sparsely-worded, continually charged atmosphere of the original story has been preserved, the script-writers have only had to distort the plot a little to squeeze ninety minutes of movie out of thirty pages of tightly-written dialogue. The only place they slipped up was at the end, where long, out-of character explanations take the edge off Hemingway's subtlety...
World War II's boldest plot-that-failed has been reported, but never as fully as in Germany's Underground. Its preliminaries, principals and political aims are now described by Manhattan Lawyer Allen W. Dulles (younger brother of State Department Adviser John Foster Dulles), who was the wartime OSS chief in Switzerland. Obviously Dulles thought the assassination plot of great importance; the OSS in Switzerland had learned of it through "secret channels" long before it came off, repeatedly advised Washington of its importance. But Allied headquarters dismissed the plot as trifling and, says Dulles, "the plotters received...
Language, to the credit of Eisenstein, is no barrier for a foreigner's complete understanding of his work, for his camera, combined with the tumultuous score of Sergei Prokofieff, fully expresses the emotional current, and the plot is distinctly visual. Photographic effects, indeed, are the strongest element in the picture, with dramatic composition in brilliant silhouetted contrast present in almost every scene. Artistic technique, in this respect, reaches its best with a show of Ivan hovering over a globe against the white interior of the imperial palace...