Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fault, as nearly as I can place it, was in the way the script made the characters think and plan. Any thinking or planning in a good English farce should be hasty and bumbling, and yet so surprisingly successful in its inept way that it cannot help but be funny. Here the characters schemed in the adolescent manner that you would expect in a Henry Aldrich radio program. In fact, the plot as it finally thrashed itself out was more on the American comedy plan than the English, with some completely believable people doing completely believable and often unfunny things...
...easy; we love war, we yearn for the feel of a gun in our hands!" The applause to his hour-long speech showed him as the only individual in Spain outside of Franco with personality and popularity of his own. As for Franco himself, his faint voice and prepared script were anticlimactic, as he declared: "If war comes, it will not resemble others. Communism cannot be fought by the inoperative liberal doctrines of the old nations. It is necessary to fight them with new ideologies." A forest of arms stretching up in the old Fascist salute showed what ideology Franco...
...flop. Julius Caesar is the first effort by M-G-M to film Shakespeare since Romeo and Juliet lost more than a quarter of a million dollars in 1936. Shakespeare is supposed to be box-office poison, but Mankiewicz and Producer John Houseman think they have a sure-fire script. Says Mankiewicz: "It's a good, rip-snorting piece of blood & thunder coupled with eternally new and true-for-today character studies...
...tragicomedy, if not a tearjerker, it is a two-thirds bore that comes to life in the last half-hour or so, when the old-master clown stops trying to be pathetic and reverts to his inimitable proper stuff. The 63-year-old comedian, who wrote the script (and the music) and directed the movie, plays an aging, down-at-heel music-hall performer who saves a beautiful young ballet dancer (Claire Bloom) from suicide in World War I London. As she rises to success with his help, he sinks to the bottom. At the fadeout, the white-haired clown...
...level of emotion at a pitch which must be shattered in the play's denouement. James Hanley's portrayal of the lover, steeped in social mores and incapable of matching his mistress' passion, alternates effectively between flippancy and noble resignment. Perhaps the one flaw in character analysis--whether through script or through Alan Webb's portrayal--is that of the jilted husband; one can never believe that he is as acquisitive and as heartless as Rattigan implies...