Word: scriptful
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This sort of journey-through-society script might have led to a movie that really moved with the erratic spontaneity of street life. But The Bicycle Thief is oddly static. Events move predictably and almost mechanically. Each small experience of the distraught hero is meticulously rounded and forced in sentiment, character coloring and social comment.Even the minor movements of the actors-the boy's tumble on a rainy street, the mother's fingering of her cheek-appear overrehearsed...
...lighting. The camera, often threading through Stark's career like a fond mamma looking for her child in a crowd, turns up all kinds of unpredictable and realistic touches. Occasionally, Director Rossen plunges spiritedly into a scene as though, in the Rossellini manner, he were making up the script as he went along...
...Karas to London, kept him plucking away at his tunes for six weeks while Reed recorded a sound track. When the film was released two months ago in England, Karas' music caused as much of a furor as Reed's directing, Graham Greene's lickety-split script, or the acting of the all-star cast (Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard...
...nothing wrong in that. If a playwright can arrange to have unknown hands reach out from doors, a Big Ben-like clock strike off-stage at tense moments, and blood trickle over door sills,--if he can work all of these (and more, as in this case) into his script without causing his audience to titter at the overlarding, then hooray...
...Everybody Does It" (perish the name) is supposed to be an hilariously funny movie. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the script, carefully avoided all opportunities for other than comic effects. This singleness of purpose makes it easy for the reviewer to pass judgment--the movie is not funny, hence it is worthless...