Word: screenplay
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...never forgiven Fred for telling you that the butler did do it.] The film ends, fades to black, and credits appear: David Holzman is played by L. M. Kit Carson; the filmmaker is Jim McBride. What we thought was documentary was the cruelest of lies, for even here screenplay has been passed off as cinema verite . Suddenly, in a numbing Borgesian inversion, the movie turns around on itself. We had come to a final knowledge-filmed life isn't life- only to have even that ripped away. Abruptly, with great shock, David Holzman's Diary comes to mean exactly what...
William Fruett's screenplay tells of two young men who leave a cloistered small-town existence in impoverished Nova Scotia for the promise of lively jobs, money and women in Toronto. They are, of course, doomed to failure. Their only city acquaintance is an uncle who refuses to recognize them; unable to find anything better, they finally drift to working in a bottling plant. Eighty dollars a week is a lavish salary to Peter and Joey, and they spend whatever they get on drinks and waitresses. When Joey, the more frivolous of the pair, knocks up a girlfriend and decides...
...having let four hours of your precious inalienable life be filched away by doddering sentimentalists. It's scarcely believable that Irish scenery so gorgeously lit could be rendered so sickening by the likes of Robert Bolt, who collaborated (for once the right word) very closely with Lean on the screenplay. But it's true: even for its own corrupt purposes Ryan's Daughter, besides being badly cast and directed, is constructed worse than almost any picture you could name...
...historical film spectacle one teetering step past the previous low mark set by Anne of the Thousand Days. Whereas Anne at least tapped a romantic vein sure to keep Redbook and Seventeen reviewers cooing, Cromwell develops no gratifying love-or period-interest. Ken Hughes' bland direction and screenplay instead distort history to remove any possible ambiguities from Cromwell's public actions during the English Revolution: he is portrayed from the very beginning of the fray as the prime, the only principled, advocate of Parliament, "people," and "democracy." The movie eventually gets smothered in its own over-simplifications...
...films strive ( Anne concluded with a pan shot of Good Queen Bess as a tot) was in Cromwell based on blatant contrivance: Cromwell the regicide was not forced during the Commonwealth to reject fawning Parliamentarians offering him a crown, though Hughes has written a totally factious scene into his screenplay precisely to that effect. The film succeeds no better as history than it has as entertainment...