Word: selznick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Reds (1981). Warren Beatty's epic is very much a recollection of Gone With the Wind, and it shares the Selznick classic's main failing: It takes too long getting to the war. Diane Keaton, we are told, is radiant enough to ensnare Beatty's Jack Reed and Nicholson's Eugene O'Neill -- but it's a captivation the viewer somehow doesn't share. And aren't "The Witnesses" just an endless parade of wizened faces fleshing out a story we'd rather watch ourselves...
...over at Columbia, found in Stewart "the uncommon common man": as a lion tamer of the wild Vanderhof clan in You Can't Take It with You and as Jefferson Smith, patron saint of patriotic lost causes, nurser of noble grudges, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. David O. Selznick saw Stewart as a worthy partner for Carole Lombard in the intelligent soaper Made for Each Other. Somebody at Universal made him the unlikely western hero of Destry Rides Again, opposite an amused Marlene Dietrich. These moguls may have undervalued Stewart as an appealing young actor who wouldn't upstage...
Says David Picker, former head of United Artists and a friend of Halmi's: "He's a throwback to the kind of creative producer--Sam Spiegel, David O. Selznick--the cultured, romantic, passionate kind, who won't let go of an idea until it happens." And who wants things the way he wants things. When Assante tried to back out of The Odyssey at one point during the production because he was unhappy about the script, Halmi slapped him with a lawsuit for the entire budget of the film. Assante came back, and Halmi conceded to a reworking...
...like Howards End and Remains of the Day, they have, almost alone, kept alive what in Cohn's day was one of Hollywood's more agreeable genres: the handsomely made, well-acted literary-historical drama. These movies reflected the cultural aspirations of producers like Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick while serving the needs of that portion of the audience not enamored of car chases and tommy-gun fire...
...tawdrier scenes are so strangely earnest that they fail to imbue this interminably long spectacle with the campiness it desperately needs. No one expected Scarlett to be comparable with David O. Selznick's Gone With the Wind, the recipient of nine Academy Awards.But it might at least have tried to measure up to Melrose Place...