Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...script, huffing & puffing to find excuses for these athletic feats, tells an opéra-bouffe story involving Lancaster's "free men of the mountains," a foreign tyrant (Frank Allenby), and a fair lady (Virginia Mayo). Happily, their contrived heroics are spiked with some unconscious comedy...
Based on research in a California veterans' hospital, Carl Foreman's script follows the daily life of a hospital for paraplegics: the routine, the physical trials, the mental scars. Much of it is bitter, engrossing stuff. Yet, as the paralyzed veterans fling barbed wisecracks at one another and their attendants, or cynically make light of their own condition, some of it is startlingly funny...
With the groundwork laid for schizophrenia, or at feast amnesia, the plot switches to Gaslight: Claudette, it turns out, is the victim of an elaborate frame-up. After using a lot of fancy psychiatric jargon in analyzing the heroine's condition, the script finally reveals the villain as melodrama's oldfashioned "mad fiend." Still unsolved: Who framed Actress Colbert into the role...
...lacks is enough respect for fiction. It is more convincing after it gets into outer space than during its earth-bound prelude, when a group of U.S. industrialists feel compelled to sponsor the lunar expedition because the Government fails to foresee the trip's military importance. Happily, the script draws the line at romance in the rocket or on the moon, but it does go in for some unrelieved comic relief by a lowbrow crew member from Brooklyn...
Many of the film's good points are curiously bound up with its faults. By some elaborately contrived plotting, the Charles Schnee script has taste enough never to allow the voice of God to be heard on the sound track (though it cannot avoid letting the actors quote Him at second hand). It also sensibly refrains from letting the radio pronouncements touch off a spree of miracles. While trying to pave the way to heaven with good, nonsectarian intentions, it winds up as a naive theological hodgepodge, finally flattens its concept of God into a fuzzy, sentimental pantheism...