Word: script
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Mondo Cane has one big flaw: the script, written by Jacopetti. The real impact of this film is visual; its point is adequately made by the sequences themselves and the way they are cut. Any narration beyond a minimal identification of what is on the screen is superfluous, and Jacopetti's is not only superfluous but also annoyingly stupid, full of bad puns, idiotic prejudices, clumsy writing, and leaden sarcasm...
...battle of the sexes, sketched in the script with deftness and insight, is too often reduced in the Harvard production to mere coquetry. Man and Superman is something of a modern morality play, with its characters symbolizing concepts rather than ordinary people. Only at times do the Harvard players achieve this universality, however; more often they are just figures in what Bentley has called the "low biological comedy" of the story...
...spite of the script, Mondo Cane is a gripping and sometimes extremely moving film. The most powerful scene was filmed on an island near Bikini, showing how animals and birds have been violently affected by the radiation from H-bomb tests. Fish have come out of the water to live in trees, and birds have tunneled underground, never to fly again. Other birds have been trying for years to hatch eggs killed by the bomb, and sea turtles whose sense of direction has been destroyed by radiation crawl inland and die after laying their eggs. After a panorama shot...
...last week, when Syria experienced its twelfth attempted coup d'état in 14 years and the only one to throw away the script. Led by ex-Colonel Jassem Alwan, who had already staged an unsuccessful coup last year, a band of army officers and civilians launched a morning attack in Damascus on the radio station and the Defense Ministry. Diplomats in Britain's new green and yellow embassy got off a cable home: "Heavy fighting in the heart of the city...
...right, but from that point forward the script consistently suggests that the men who hold the front line of the free world's defenses aren't half as scared of the Russians as they are of the little woman...