Word: screenplay
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Compulsion (Zanuck Productions; 20th Century-Fox) is a terse, tense, intelligent melodramatization of "the crime of the century": the Leopold-Loeb murder case of 1924. Richard Murphy's screenplay borrows many of its keenest scenes from Meyer Levin's Broadway version of his own bestselling casebook of the crime (TIME, Nov. 12, 1956), preserves in the film (103 minutes) all the essential details of the play (180 minutes), eliminates only a few of the far-out psychiatric references. One important addition: a taut sense of dramatic sequence...
Elmer Bernstein's music heightens the drama captured by the sensitive cameras of James Wong Howe, A.S.C. In addition, there are several jazz numbers by the Chico Hamilton quintet (plus guitar), a group whose modern arrangements lend a suitably syncopated rhythm. The screenplay, by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (who wrote the book), is for the most part brilliant, capturing the lingo perfectly: "What am I? a bowl of fruit? a tangerine that peels itself?" Or: "Starting today, you could play marbles with his eyeballs." And the pace of director Alexander Mackendrick keeps up with that of the music...
...having spent so much time in Hollywood; he should have written more plays to increase his repertory rather than running out to the West Coast for six months at a time. In connection with his Hollywood experience, he recalls once being asked by producer Sol Wurtzel to do a screenplay for Dante's Inferno. "That requires a lot of research," Behrman replied. "Oh, no," said Wurtzel, "you can see the silent film." Behrman's most recent screenplay is the new Ben Hur: "there are 126 camels and 126 writers, and they all have about the same effect on the picture...
...Greenwich Village weekly. Now Cartoonist Feiffer is up to his clean, button-down collar in offers from publishers. One book of his cartoons is a bestseller (5,000 copies a week). He appears in the London Observer, dashes off magazine ads and features (Playboy, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED), is discussing a screenplay for Director Stanley (Paths of Glory) Kubrick. His income tax for 1958 will be more than his entire income for 1957 (about $7,500), and his 1959 gross promises to run into six figures. This week Feiffer and the Hall Syndicate ("Herblock," Norman Vincent Peale, Pogo) announced that starting...
...Colonel. Danny Kaye, in his first serious role, proves in some ways funnier than ever, and S. N. Behrman's screenplay is a graceful example of gallows humor (TIME, Sept...