Word: showman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unlike Merrick, George Birnbaum has had the sense-and the guts-to rely on the booze in Take Me Along and not the pizzazz. Isn't it nice to know that there's a director around here with more integrity than Broadway's most successful showman...
...courage, a brooding tale of three stunt parachutists bound by the brotherhood of danger. Rettig (Burt Lancaster) is a moody enigma who gets his kicks by pulling his rip cord at the last possible moment. Browdy (Gene Hackman) looks like something out of Sinclair Lewis, a perspiring, frenetic showman who goes to confession before every jump. Malcolm (Scott Wilson) is a kid trying to challenge the deadening effects of a loveless, lonely childhood...
...time. But their reduction in scale and the last-minute pruning serve only to concentrate our attention on the twin concerns which have been announcing themselves in his work with increasing vehemence at least since White Sale, his first unabashedly personal production: The vision of Mayer as director of showman and the vision of Mayer as artist, poet of the physically tormented. Perhaps because there was so little time to moderate or reshape, and so little time to draw on the formidable talents of his friends, Mayer has given clearer voice to these fundamental propositions about his own world than...
...redeeming element is the staging by Director Gene Frankel: the menacing beat of tom-toms, eerie flickering lights, harsh ritual dances and the brooding presence of totemic animal masks give the play a body that the text lacks. Stacy Keach's Buffalo Bill is pistol-bright as the showman, but the man within remains tantalizingly masked...
Despite its director's reputation, La Prisonnière is the kind of skin-flick that rarely makes it off the grind-house circuit. But this film is being released in the U.S. by Joseph E. Levine, a canny showman with a shrewd instinct for profitable exploitation. Five years ago, the only chained-up people in Levine movies were Mediterranean musclemen and Nubian slaves. From this standpoint at least, La Prisonnière marks a certain kind of progress...