Word: scripted
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...ticket home. The official French entry at last May's Cannes Festival, La Guerre was withdrawn from competition under pressure from Spain. It is easy to see why: the villain of the piece is all too clearly the Franco government. Yet as Jorge Semprun's script makes clear, the revolutionists are not precisely heroes either. In the film's most insightful scene, Diego confronts a group of young incendiaries hell-bent on burning Spain to the ground. Both sides are presented as helpless amputees of history; the old rebel has a past but no future, the terrorists...
...official French entry at last May's Cannes Festival, La Guerre was withdrawn from competition under pressure from Spain. It is easy to see why: the villain of the piece is all too clearly the Franco government. Yet as Jorge Semprun's script makes clear, the revolutionists are not precisely heroes either. In the film's most insightful scene, Diego confronts a group of young incendiaries hell-bent on burning Spain to the ground. Both sides are presented as helpless amputees of history; the old rebel has a past but no future, the terrorists a future...
Scenarist Paul Dehn, who also wrote the script for Spy, this time too often jumps the main track of the tale to lollygag along a branch line, and Director Sidney Lumet (The Group) has either miscast or misdirected some of his principals. Mason and Signoret, however, are pathetically impressive as a couple of mice wandering in a maze designed for rats. And as a whole, the film convincingly elucidates in a modern instance why Dante consigned traitors to the very pit of hell. Le Carre similarly perceives treason as a spiritual attitude underlying the political act. His traitors are liars...
Last week he shouted, "Come to me, baby!" through a locked door in a St.-Tropez apartment house. Inside, Isabelle Pons, 24, a sometime model and script girl and his former mistress, told him to go away. Levy fired a shotgun into his belly and died 20 minutes later in the hospital...
Given that script formula is a standard and perhaps valid dramatic device to facilitate the presentation of exciting material, Grand Prix's evil is not so much that it is an old-fashioned formula picture, but that it bungles the job miserably and wallows for 2 1/2 of its 3 hours in its own plot complications. Arthur spends too much time on his dreary characters, barely managing to solve their problems and tie-up the loose ends for the finish. He introduces an English driver (Brian Bedford) who competes neurotically to break the track record of his dead brother...