Word: prometheus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Term of Trial is the latest in the "slice of treacle" series of British movies: each drips with middle-class realism, each shows the struggles of a Prometheus figure against his sordid environment. Sir Laurence Olivier and High Griffith guarantee some high points in acting. But it is difficult to see why the Venice Film Festival awarded a prize to director and author Peter Glenville; for the ultimate in realism, toward which Glenville strives, is also the ultimate dramatic defect-dullness...
...Prometheus this time is a sensitive and dedicated teacher, Graham Weir (Oliver). His woes include a nagging wife, (Simone Signoret), a prison record for conscientious objection to World War Two, and a classroom full of monsters and hoodlums. One pleasant fellow in particular, Mitchell(Terence Stamp), has teacher assaulted by thugs when he feels slighted. Long suffering Weir refuses to "bash the little beggars," as more practical colleagues suggest; his code of sensitivity and non-violence is at length rewarded when two pupils show genuine signs of intellectual curiosity...
...been starved of love by her family; she lets a gentleness on Weir's part toward her desires to learn kindle a puerile passion for him. The passion must be dashed, and the result is an unpleasant trial of the teacher for indecent assault. Acquittal does not save Prometheus's reputation, and Weir is forced to destroy one principle, truth, to save even his marriage. The camera moves in for a close-up of the famous Olivier face, furrowed with the look of infinite sadness but eternal resignation...
...really the founders of Western civilization? The Greeks themselves looked to Crete, whose earlier Minoan civilization is newly being appreciated with the deciphering of the script called Linear B. As scholars, but few laymen, know, Crete, not Greece, was the land of the myths-of Zeus and the Titans, Prometheus, Hyperion, Orpheus and Hercules. It was on Crete that Daedalus built the labyrinth and Icarus took off for history's first air crash. The vast Palace of Minos, whose foundations were laid around 5000 B.C., grew to a colossal structure whose apartments were equipped with bathrooms and flush toilets...
Something Wild (Prometheus; United Artists) is somewhat woolly. Director Jack Garfein and Novelist Alex Karmel are listed as the men who wrote the movie, but it plays as though the script had been done by three other people...