Word: scripted
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Director Joel Schwartz did what he could with the script, and all things considered, he did a lot. Judged professionally, House Afire would rate low grade B, but the production is meant to entertain, and it does so beautifully...
...different disguises, and his impersonation of a crackly-voiced beggar woman in "I Beg of You" nearly steals the show. Sandra Robbins, as Columbina, sings the eighteenth century melodies beautifully, if a bit too softly, but she has trouble warming to the sex-ridden requirements of the twentieth-century script...
Beyond Miss Dukakis, however, Murray's success is due almost solely to the power of the script; most of the cast is either bland or annoyingly energetic. `Louis Zorich gives a sporadically moving, but basically uninspired, performance as the step-father. When he confounds the Director by positing the elusiveness of human reality, he sounds more like a philosophy student reciting chapter and verse than a man whose very movement is tortured by the recollection of his lechery. Even in the early moments, when taunted by his step-daughter, Zorich seems overly calm and cold...
People are consumer products to Sammy Glick, and when he has consumed enough-script writers, girl friends, studio chiefs-he reaches the projection room at the top of World Wide Studio. At musical's end, he is faced with the topman cliché: "You're all alone, Sammy Glick." As Sammy, Steve Lawrence moves with the wary savage grace of a jungle cat, and when he claws, he claws. Bernice Massi, the banker's daughter Sammy marries, matches him in velvety ferocity. In a subplot romance, Robert Alda and Sally Ann Howes seem to be going through...
...there are Negroes at the President's press conference as the film closes. These are simply kowtows to the New Republic set; if the producer had real guts he could have cast Sydney Poitier in Kirk Douglas' role. But then Producer Edward Lewis would have been troubled by the script's implication that Douglas will some day sleep with Ava Gardner, who plays Lancaster's former mistress. Miscegenation might have confused the good guys and the bad guys, particularly for southern audiences. Anything that controversial would have detracted from the film's propaganda force...