Word: screenplay
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Smacking his lips, Wald went on: "Ulysses is the only original novel written in our time, and you have to respect it. I think Mr. Joyce was an excellent screenplay writer. I've been going over and over the book to see what the camera can do. There's Stephen the artist, searching for someone to replace his drunken father, and Mr. Bloom, searching for the son he's lost. Ulysses is essentially an adventure story. The characters have to do with the perennial struggle between all men because of their desire to compete...
Brilliant symbolic photography confuses an audience so that it does not notice these defects. The virtue is that the viewer can read what he likes into the screenplay, and tends to blame obscurity on his own imperception; but the price is that technique becomes more important than either structure or meaning. At its best in the Virgin Spring, the technique is dazzling, and the already quiet audience becomes deathly silent when the householder drives his knife into a table and waits for the murders to wake. But this fascination holds the viewer rather than drawing his mind and sympathies into...
...plight of Antoine Doinel could easily lend itself to appalling pathos, but Truffaut (who also wrote the screenplay) has scrupulously avoided this danger. Child-like comic effects predominate in many scenes, particularly those without adults; and realizing that in spite of his trials Dolnel can still behave like a happy and naive little boy, the viewer is made acutely aware of the wide gulf between the child and the adult. The film thus evokes a sense of frustration rather than pity...
...situation has possibilities, but neither in his script nor in his direction does Writer-Director Richard Murphy (best known for the screenplay of Compulsion) make anything like the most of them. Still, he keeps his Ship scudding along as though it had somewhere to go, and he keeps the screen jumping with excitement: enemy planes, friendly minefields, men overboard, snipers in the plastic shrubbery. Above all, he keeps his camera trained on Funnyman Lemmon, who saves scene after scene with a pert piece of mugging, and hits the jackpot on any payoff line. Recipe for Hollywood producers...
Like the ballad that inspired it. The Virgin Spring is a myth, and as a myth it is treated in this film. Bergman's style, usually subtle and allusive, is startlingly simple. The script, written under Bergman's supervision by Novelist Ulla Isaksson, who also did the screenplay for Brink of Life, is as clear and grave as a Mass. The actors, as always finely disciplined by Bergman, behave as formally as acolytes. The photography is as beautiful as it generally is in Bergman's pictures, but if anything more plain-there are very few cute shots...