Word: scriptful
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...shot theater, mostly because Paul Muni, who played Darrow, developed his role into an unforgettable set piece of libertarian tirade. Thanks to Producer-Director Stan ley Kramer, Inherit the Wind has now been made into a movie that retains al most nothing of the play but its flashy, trashy script...
Bryan, of course, is not called Bryan in the picture; all the principal characters are given false names. But their historical identities, emphasized by the makeup department and in the script, are never in doubt, and the flagrant distortion of their qualities and motives may therefore seem all the more reprehensible to moviegoers who hold these serious and important men in memory. Mencken, for example, is portrayed by Gene Kelly as a lip-curling, hat-tilting city-room slicker who talks the sort of typewritten tarradiddle that does less than justice to the rich, organic vocabulary of the author...
...script's attempts at shocking dialogue either fall flat or are pointlessly vulgar. There is, it should be noted, a difference between a shocking line and a vulgar one. In an effectively staged but poorly written suicide scene, young Rutland's speech alternates between teen-age hipness and Southern degeneracy. Rutland eyes Sandy Dennis (playing Millicent Bishop, soon to be a corpse) lecherously and leers, "We gone take it from the top." When Millie blurts out the news that she is pregnant, Rutland reacts all over the place: he babbles to himself, "Millie, Millicent, Millicentus..." He declares, "There...
Huston and Reinhardt first commissioned French Philosopher-Playwright Jean Paul Sartre to do the script. Sartre responded with a 450-page outline (many times the usual length of a first-draft film treatment), and Huston sent it back with gentle suggestions for cutting. From Paris came a second version, 870 pages long, and a third, running to 1,000. Huston quietly set them aside. One trouble was that the script suffered from Sartre's galloping Marxism and deep-seated anti-Freudianism. Said Sartre last week: "Je m'en fiche" (meaning, more or less. "I don't give...
After the script, the most urgent problem is casting. Marilyn Monroe has expressed interest in the part of Cecilie, and there are fond hopes of acquiring Marlon Brando for the part of Sigmund Freud. Brando, after all, made his stage debut in I Remember Mama...