Word: screenplay
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...plot, on the whole, is hopelessly confused. With several critical but racy factors in the novel (like pornography, homosexuality, and nymphomania) censored out of the screenplay, much of the motivation in the movie becomes grossly unclear, and Marlowe's deductive sequence is damn near impossible to follow. But all that doesn't really matter, since witty dialogue and unflinching violence would be the film's outstanding features even if the plot made sense...
...Finest Hours is less a historical biography of Churchill than an uncritical tribute to him. The Churchill of Victor Wolfson's unobtrusive, and, I think, appropriate screenplay is a Churchill who was always right: right about the potential of air power and tanks in 1916, right about the futility of appeasement in 1938, right about the danger of Soviet expansionism in 1945. And it is true that his historian's mind had few equals in its grasp of European international politics. But his vision sometimes failed; he was poorly equipped to deal with such postwar problems as economic adjustment...
Since Yevgeni Gabrilovich and Michail Schweitzer prepared a screenplay which sticks to the plot of the novel and happens to run two-and-a-half hours, and since I happen to be the only one I know who has read Tolstoy's novel, a discussion of plot might be in order now. But leave until last the easy stuff that's been around, as Frank Harris used to say. You should see this movie...
...roughly the same plot, the darkly gleaming heart of it has undergone major surgery. In a postscript to his play, Dürrenmatt wrote: "Nothing could harm this comedy with a tragic end more than heavy seriousness." Director Bernhard Wicki falls into that error, compounding it with a gimmicky screenplay. The eunuchs, the coffin, and much of the mordant wit are omitted, as is the wooden leg. The sex angle is fattened up with a juicy subplot. And to make the slow corrosion of conscience more graphic, the good burghers of Guellen struggle against the all-too-solid temptation...
...Sinatra is a fulltime professional who personally supervises every phase of production from the ordering of ten gallons of concentrated "blood" (needed to provide 50 gallons of gore when mixed with water) to learning the script so thoroughly that he never has to look at the screenplay. He knows every cast and crew member by name, though he calls most of the Japanese "Freddy," thinks privately "they should all be called Kim." The cast and crew are impressed. A prop man claims "He really listens to you." Actor Tatsuya Mihashi, "the Japanese Robert Taylor," calls him a director "who knows...