Word: screenplay
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...Palance is a movie heavy so heavy that he makes Jack the Ripper seem no more than a sort of lovable nuisance on a late date. In this picture, in fact, he literally does just that. Director Hugo Fregonese lets himself get caught between his old-fashioned devil (the screenplay is based on Marie Belloc Lowndes's 1913 thriller, The Lodger) and the deep blue sea of modern psychiatric interpretation...
...with Eternity. The acting of Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, and every single supporting player confront the spectator with real people. The dialogue, much of it taken directly from the book, allows them to talk like normal people. The screenplay skillfully moves them back and forth in plausible situations. The capsule of authenticity is absolute, and thus none of the force of the action is dissipated...
Based on R. C. Sherriff's Home at Seven, a hit play of the 1950 London season, Anatole de Grunwald's screenplay inherits some theatrical virtues. Its scenes are clearly built, its parts consistently written. The story itself moves at about the speed of Fate with a hotfoot. The speed, along with some lively shifts of camera angle, almost prevents a moviegoer from realizing that the camera, poor dog, is not really bounding free through the narrative growth, but poodling along on a choke leash of stagy words...
...attribute the force of the illusion to any single element is difficult. Certainly the screenplay is an achievement. Faithful to Raymond Radiguet's story of his adolescent affair with a young married woman, it nevertheless sharpens its poignancy. The sympathetic portrayal of the lovers' parents, seen only dimly in the book, greatly enriches the plot. But more important, the film strips the story of the irritating elements of the book: Radiguet's smug introspection and pride of exploit. Shifted into the character of the schoolboy, rather then coloring the whole account, the immaturity and egoism of the young lover appear...
...afford to think of poetry as a living. To eke out his own, he does what he can in other writing fields. And he is certainly among the few living poets, not to mention scenario writers, who could successfully have written The Doctor and the Devils, the screenplay for a new British film.* Published as a book, his script combines some of the best virtues of fiction and drama. What is just as important, Poet Thomas remains a poet while doing a job that most highbrow poets would pooh-pooh, unless it were offered to them...