Word: screenplay
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...screenplay, Michael Blankfort has wisely lopped away some of the over-melodramatic incidents of his 1952 novel to create a convincing chase story with vivid topographical and psychological landscapes. Kirk Douglas in the title role makes an affecting individual of the D.P. in flight from the law and himself. He is alternately cocky and wisecracking, lonely and obsessed by fears. As Yael, the sabra (native-born Israeli) girl who comes to love the juggler and helps set him on the road to recovery, Italian Actress Milly Vitale is a plumply pretty figure dressed in shorts and lugging a rifle...
This conventional screenplay has been filmed in entirely unconventional style by Producer-Director George (A Place in the Sun) Stevens. One of Hollywood's most painstaking craftsmen, Stevens for the first time has turned his individualistic director's talents to a western-and with striking results. From the opening shot in which buckskin-clad Shane, a sort of blond Apollo of the plains, rides into view on a roan horse, the film is marked by the kind of distinctive, richly detailed picture-making that is scarcely ever lavished on the most high-toned movie drama, let alone...
...couple of pleasant young people, Doris Day and Gordon MacRae singing a number of pleasant old songs, e.g. If You Were the Only Girl, My Home Town Is a One-Horse Town -but Its Big Enough for Me, and the title tune. Unfortunately, there is also a screenplay. Too vaguely based on Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories, the picture unreels some foolishly romantic complications in a small Indiana town at the threshold of the Jazz Age. Among those present: a stuffy paterfamilias (Leon Ames), an understanding mother (Rosemary DeCamp), a comic maid (Mary Wickes), an unruly youngster (Billy Gray...
...other night, after seeing Les Enfants de Paradis at the Brattle, I was strongly moved to both ecstatic praise and frustrating anger. There was and is no doubt in my mind that the movie is a masterpiece--in acting, screenplay, photography and direction. I was angry at myself only because I had never learned French well enough to do without the English subtitles. I have seen many French movies, and never felt so furious about this, but I have never seen a foreign language movie comparable to Les Enfants de Paradis...
Directed and co-authored by onetime Lawyer André Cayatte, Justice Is Done is well acted, and the strands of its many characters and incidents are adroitly interwoven. But the screenplay is often on the super-melodramatic side. Subtitled The Secret Lives and Loves of a French Jury, the picture goes in for such farfetched plotting as having the defendant's lover (Michel Auclair) woo an elderly lady juror (Valentine Tessier) in order to win over her vote. And, even for courtroom drama, Justice Is Done is far too talky...