Word: screenplay
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...next picture, De Sica will direct Sophia in a loose adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona. The screenplay has perhaps the darkest plot that has ever thickened. A young German (Max Schell) feels so guilty about his part in the war that he becomes a dope addict. Various women try to cure him with love, first his sister, then his sister-in-law (Sophia Loren), but not even that much sex can help him. He has a fight with his ex-Nazi father (Fredric March), then a reconciliation. Then both men commit suicide...
Minnesota-born Steve Shadegg is a man of several parts. He started out, after graduation from high school, studying acting and directing at California's Pasadena Playhouse. He moved to Phoenix to sell insurance, next turned to radio, magazine and screenplay writing. For years he has run Phoenix's S-K Research Laboratories, a small pharmaceutical house (a chief product: Adreno-Mist. a relief for asthma). All the while, he has been active in the Protestant Episcopal Church; last year, he was elected to its National Council. Shadegg got into politics in 1938, managing the campaign...
...paper, All Fall Down has plenty going for it: an all-star cast, an able producer (John Houseman), a talented young director (John Frankenheimer), a screenplay adapted by a famous playwright (William Inge) from a notable novel by James Leo Herlihy. On acetate, these virtues seem reversed. The story is incidental and interminable, the scene-writing lacks Ingenuity, the characters are cliche, the direction is untidy, the actors are Actors' Studious-Beatty in particular employs a scabious charm that fails to explain his part but might be said to communicate Berry-berry...
...everything else about Murder (She Said) is handsome too. Messrs. Justice and Kennedy are agreeable objects, the one as a bed-ridden patriarch, the other as a sympathetic country doctor from this side of the water. The direction is brisk, the screenplay properly ominous, and some one has written a remarkably lively musical score, which is performed on what sounds like a bar-room harpsichord. One trusts that Miss Rutherford's long deferred American fame will now at length, be firmly secured...
...Children's Hour (Mirisch; United Artists) is Director William Wyler's second try at doing right by Lillian Hellman's 1934 stage melodrama, whose burden was that lesbianism may be regrettable, but a nasty, spying child is simply intolerable. In 1936, when the first screenplay was made, Hollywood shied away from abnormal psychology. Wyler dropped the tainted Hellman title (the picture was renamed These Three) and changed an irregular triangle (young doctor loves girl teacher, and so does another girl teacher) into a right triangle (the two girl teachers love the young doctor...