Word: scenarists
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Director Joseph Mankiewicz has described his direction as that of "the oldest whole in the business," and the Hollywood professionalism he referred to in that way contributes to the film's successful adaptation. Sleuth is a group effort of the scenarist, director, and actors, where Mankiewicz's role was directing the performances and letting the play speak for itself. His direction of the filming, as always, is devoid of innovation but adequate for his task; he exploits slow zooms and cut-ins to create or relieve tension, and makes most shots as simple as possible. Unfortunately, a few simple mistakes...
...Fail Safe and The Deadly Affair, Lumet showed a strong and substantial flair for melodrama, but nearly everything seems to go wrong for him in Child's Play, from Michael Small's sonorous and silly score to the untidy accumulation of anticlimaxes left about by the scenarist...
...lieu of characterization, Scenarist Stone (Charade, Father Goose) furnishes each prominent member of the congress with a quirk or a foible by which he will be easily recognizable, if not quite human. Thus John Adams (William Daniels) is a prig, Jefferson (Ken Howard) a love-smitten daydreamer, Franklin (Howard Da Silva) a convivial pragmatist, and so on. The actors seize on these poor scraps and work them to death, although they should probably be commended for not breaking into giggles over such Stone dialogue as "Better get yourself down to Congress, Mr. Adams" or "Reconciliation my ass-the people want...
...played a lot of character roles in movies like The Great Escape before becoming a star in Europe, where his poignant struggle with polysyllables is presumably lost in translation. The Valachi Papers, shot almost totally in Rome, is in English, a bad break for Bronson, worse luck for the scenarist and the rest...
Losey and Mosley take some pains to hew closely to the known facts of what the scenarist calls "one of the most documented murders in history." Jacson, for example, did have a girl friend who visited Trotsky and sometimes assisted him with secretarial work. Although the real Jacson never admitted to any motive for the murder, he is widely believed to have been a Stalinist agent. In the film, however, Losey makes a sonorous attempt to turn the murder into an oblique existential tract and the assassin into a schizoid avenging angel. Like characters in such previous and more estimable...