Word: script
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...well that ends well? The question is asked too often and too clumsily by a script that often muddles a magnificent theme and by principals who act as if they were reading the daily yoghurt-production report on Radio Bucharest. Yet in the film's final scene, the question is put again with inquisitorial ferocity. Reunited with his wife at last, the hero finds her a middle-aged ruin, with skin like cracked mud and a rapist's baby in her arms. In her eyes he sees the wreck that horror and hardship have made...
Blow-Up's editing is weakest when the script allows Antonioni to be self-indulgent, the scenes in which he passes judgment on mod society. The cutting in the first photography session with Verushka, the mini-orgy, the rock and roll sequence seems purposeless and overly self-conscious. Antonioni's best editing is found in the sequences with dramatic purpose and direction: the blow-up sequence and the discovery of the corpse. Both deal with extended action--a lengthy process of printing and examining photo enlargements, and a long walk through a park--and Antonioni must use editing...
...festival films are nonmusicals, but they too are strictly Celluloid City. In Kitty Foyle, Ginger's apotheosis of the gallant American White Collar Girl won her an Oscar. In Magnificent Doll, she plays Dolley Madison. Forced into a role that is above her head and a script that is beneath her, she utters Dolley's immortal words to the jailed traitor Aaron Burr (David Niven): "I hope all this will make you think, Aaron...
What attacks Generals fatally and finally is neither its cliché-ridden script nor its miscast stars, but the gemütlich approach of Director Anatole Litvak. The slick editing and the bright, bold colors seem less to polish the picture than to varnish it, and they cannot cover the film's faults. The waifs of German-occupied Warsaw are too plump and well padded, the armies seem too clean and well mannered. And the officers are too self-consciously symbolic of Germany's decadence and decency, grossness and grace. Somewhere beneath it all is a plausible plot...
...field. Guy Hamilton, a hack if ever there was one, has directed Funeral in Berlin, a clumsy, convoluted, illegitimate offspring of The Ipcress File in which agent Harry Palmer, again played by Michael Caine, proves a powerful bore. The direction is admittedly undistinguished, but the script to Funeral really takes the cake: the spy sets out to get an East German big-wig out of East Berlin; naturally the unsuspecting audience assumes this is what the picture is about, but around the middle, part one gets neatly resolved and the plot begins anew, now dealing with the absurdly complex...