Word: script
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...just bumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition. Part of what is wrong went wrong in the cutting room, and for that Darryl Zanuck, boss of 20th Century-Fox, is possibly to blame. But much of what is wrong was wrong in the script, and for that Chief Scenarist Mankiewicz must wear the ears. Part One seems on the whole a competent and entertaining picture, but in Part Two, Mankiewicz goes wildly wrong...
Antony and Cleopatra, as Mankiewicz conceives them, are all too human. He is an aging politician, she is his ambitious mistress. The script says they are in love but they obviously aren't. Nothing suggests that the most famous lovers of all time felt anything better than lust. What the hero calls love is a Freudian fixation, what the heroine calls love is a power complex. The motives of the central characters are confused and ultimately mean, and as a result their tragedy is befuddled and ultimately petty...
...confusions of the scenario inevitably confound the actors. Burton staggers around looking ghastly and spouting irrelevance, like a man who suddenly realizes that he has lost his script and is really reading some old sides from King of Kings. And in the big love scenes "the ne'er-lust-wearied Antony" seems strangely bored-as if perhaps he had rehearsed too much...
Irma La Douce is no animated French postcard; its sexiness is played for belly laughs, not snickers. By pruning the script of prurience, Wilder and Diamond have managed to treat the sale of sex with vulgar good humor. Irma has no moral, of course; yet as an essay on virtue v. venery, it is as uplifting as a graduation address-and ten times funnier...
...Feds, he beats the punk unconscious. Then, instead of tying him up, he drives a railroad spike through his hand and into the floor. The Girl Hunters was filmed at London's Elstree Studios, and the English just aren't accustomed to that sort of thing: the script girl got sick...