Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...does Hitchcock come up to his old high mark in his use of British humor. Though it tries for more laughs than it gets, the comedy is funny enough to give the script its major distinction. But the fun no longer serves the shrewd purpose to which the director put it in The Lady Vanishes, where it lent extra point to the suspense. In Stage Fright the humor is mainly incidental, and pursued at enough length to slacken the story's tension...
...Academy Award selection board members fail to recognize "All the King's Men" as the best movie of 1949, they will be overlooking some of the best acting, directing, and script writing to appear in recent years...
...ugly rumor preceded the play here--to the effect that the happy flow of profanity in the script would be weeded out by local censors. Suffice it to say that this proved to be a considerable exaggeration. Seaman Insigna, who was a small, noisy Italian in the New York version, is a small, noisy Irishman in the Boston version. That's the one significant difference, and that seems only logical...
There is some lag in the early parts of the film, but when the Mary Loos-Richard Sale script finally manages to give Willie (Dan Dailey) his overseas assignment, it hits the stride of runaway farce. Within a wild four days, Willie flies the Atlantic twice, bails out of a B-17 over German-held France, joins the French underground, carries a top enemy secret to Eisenhower's headquarters and the Pentagon-and winds up back in Punxsutawney, suspected of desertion...
...acting corresponds to the emotional economy of the script. Ian Hunter and Alison Leggatt are perfectly cast as the major and his wife. They act with simplicity and poignant reserve. Rosalie Crutchley lends vitality to the generally quiet production as the distraught war-wife; in addition, she is very beautiful. And Peter Illing plays excellently the role of the oily Syrian merchant who serves both as the protagonist of the plot and as a moral foil to the major...