Word: screenplay
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...Ashore (Columbia) is an amiable little cinemusical with pretty girls, Technicolored scenery, several jingly songs-and practically no screenplay. The slapdash script follows three sailors (Mickey Rooney, Dick Haymes, Ray McDonald) through their shore leave at Catalina. By the fadeout, at a lavish Polynesian beach party, they have each found a girl (Barbara Bates, Jody Lawrence, Peggy Ryan). This is the sort of picture in which the characters have such names as Moby Dickerson and Gay Knight. All Ashore is at its brightest when it gives sawed-off Mickey Rooney a chance to hoof, sing, do assorted pratfalls...
Plymouth Adventure, based on an imaginative, fictional account of the Mayflower voyage, tacks on to history an affair between Dorothy Bradford (Gene Tierney) and the skipper. But the movie dehydrates the romance into one embrace, and then forces Mrs. Bradford into a quick suicide. Besides this, the screenplay only diverges from the accepted in its characterization of the captain, a figure not discussed in any of the records...
...Through is described by Director David (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations) Lean as "a modern adventure story." It is also a stunning film flight into the unknown, an imaginatively told movie about the human imagination exploring the whole new realm of the air. Terence (The Winslow Boy) Rattigan's screenplay examines both flight and flyers: the stresses & strains, mechanical as well as human, of its theme. A pioneer aviation magnate (played with consummate craft by Ralph Richardson) is dedicated to penetrating the sound barrier. Before his "evil vision" is vindicated, his son (Denholm Elliott) and his son-in-law (Nigel...
...topnotch cast, most of whom worked for less than their regular salaries to be identified with such a big "prestige" picture: Marlon Brando (Mark Antony), Louis Calhern (Caesar), James Mason (Brutus), John Gielgud (Cassius), Deborah Kerr (Portia), Greer Garson (Calpurnia). The screenplay, reportedly all Shakespeare, contains no "additional dialogue." Says Producer Houseman: "We kept it in black-and-white because there are certain parallels between this play and modern times. People associate dictators with black-and-white newsreel shots of them haranguing the crowds . . . Mussolini on the balcony, that sort of thing. With color, you lose that reality...
...actually silent. It has a rich, sometimes overemphatic musical score. And it has all sorts of literal sound effects: the click of a microfilm camera, the rustle of papers, the jangle of telephones, the blare of radios, opening & closing doors. Unfortunately, Director Russell Rouse (who also co-authored the screenplay with Producer Clarence Greene) has not used his sound track, or his camera, in a particularly imaginative way. The Thief is an interesting stunt and a fairly exciting thriller. But in telling its story visually, it merely proves what has been obvious ever since sound came to the screen: most...