Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lean's feeling was that nothing could defeat him but an inability to match Bolt's script and measure up somehow to the looming background figure of Pasternak. For although Bolt and Lean had simplified the novel to bring the love story into bright focus, Lean still had to cope with the evocation of revolutionary Russia and the land itself. "I don't think this is so much a novel," says Bolt, "as an enormous disguised poem...
Lean got what he went for, including the most tantalizing shot in the script. It calls for a frosted pane of glass, through which Zhivago is gazing, to dissolve into a field vibrant with daffodils. Lean found the perfect pane in a ski shack, hauled it into the open for the cameras. Then back the camera crew went to Spain, where 4,000 potted daffodils were put in place to complete the scene. On film, the sequence takes only an instant to show the change of seasons, but for Lean the effect is essential...
...Quixote-Cervantes, Richard Kiley is at least as good as Richard Burton in Camelot, and his singing voice is far better. He handles himself with grace and gallantry despite some crippling vulgarities in the Dale Wasserman script. Considering the pitch of her voice and the plunge of her neckline, Joan Diener is less an auditory than a visual treat. Irving Jacobson's Yiddish-accent Sancho Panza presents another problem...
...rock-'n'-roll idol, Sylvie Vartan. Playing a yé-yé girl who won't say no, blonde Sylvie is a mildly accomplished comedienne with two oddly spaced front teeth that give her a look of elfin corruption. On the screen, despite a paltry script, she twists her diminutive curves into every parent's nightmare vision of a wayward, irresistible, aggressively precocious teen...
...music and photography, for all their beauty and aptness, are only corollaries to the script. The author, Archibald MacLeish, wisely insisted that Glazier and Laderman work from it without changes. It is simple and poetic, yet within the eulogistic lyricism, MacLeish offers dozens of fresh insights into the motives and character of Mrs. Roosevelt. He makes her humanity human. And at the end we know the woman, not as a psychiatrist or a political admirer would, but as her friends must have...