Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With so much dough riding the throw, Duvivier carefully hedged his bet. His script tore down Tolstoy's complex scaffolding of historico-religious theory, eliminated the subplots, preserved only the central study of a falling woman, with a few glimpses of the high society she fell from. This might have been sufficient if the film had also saved a suggestion of the dreadful glacier-creep of Tolstoy's characterization. Instead, the camera work is uniformly uninspired, and the psychological glacier dissolves into teary slush...
Vivien Leigh is lashed about by the tremendous role of Anna like a pussy cat with a tigress by the tail. She is not assisted by a script which insists on sentimentally ennobling one of fiction's most vehemently average women. Irish-born Kieron Moore, Britain's newest cinematinee idol, is badly miscast as the debonair Vronsky; he appears to be an idol with feet of peat. The principals suffer further by comparison with Sir Ralph Richardson, whose Karenin fairly lumps out the screen with its three-dimensional reality...
...with a time-honored favorite son. And so long as Frank Capra sticks to the original Crouse and Lindsey stage play, his treatment is entertaining. The story of the airplane builder who runs for president and discovers that "he must approve everything except sin" has been filmed true to script. Spencer Tracy blusters sufficiently for a man who jumps into politics over his neck and gradually discovers that handing out golden platitudes on silver platters is a tricky business. He winces effectively as his managers tell him that people are nice but they don't count--only votes matter...
...field of comedy, however, the Trib players allow themselves to romp with such abandon that the script becomes a contender for the laughter of the audience. The challenge offered by William Shakespeare in "The Taming of the Shrew," for instance, was met on the more or less neutral grounds of Mutual Hall last week and the Trib players won by a technical knockout, a decision with which the audience seemed clearly in accord. Mr. Duvey had rounded up some clever, earthy comedians and they succeeded in making "The Taming of the Shrew" a lot of fun for everyone...
...lead. She wallows in a bubblegumbo of teen-talk ("Johnny had on a suede coat that just wouldn't quit!"), is really sincere about her role. She longs to become "a great actress - I want so to be an actress!" With this objective, she scorns reading from the script: "I memorize...