Word: tableaux
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Christopher Columbus (Rank; Universal-International) turns an exciting bit of history into a series of dull tableaux in antiqued color. Even ten-year-olds, at whom this British-made movie is plainly aimed, will find it about as thrilling as an afternoon spent looking at Christmas cards...
...would promise to "obey" her husband. And the details of the wedding cake were all set. It would be only a four-layer austerity affair, with a few decorative accents (Elizabeth's and Philip's crests, small reproductions of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral; little tableaux; a battle scene at Cape Matapan, some musical emblems, Cupid holding the bride's and groom's initials, the crest of the Royal Navy, the badges of the ATS and the Girl Guides, a representation of H.M.S. Valiant, the badges of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India...
...concentric Chinese boxes, this hypersymmetrical rake's progress is as stylized in its performance as in its structure. It is more like a puppet show than a flesh & blood comedy, and its dialogue is in dialect as formal as the colloquy of Mandarins. The puppets often strike tableaux which have charm, irony and even beauty, of a kind. But it is a kind so rigid and remote from simple human warmth that honest laughs come few & far between. It is an unusual, skilful and singularly lifeless little picture...