FILMS BRIEFLY
FILMS BRIEFLY Patterns. In the growing cycle of films treating big business from the inside: e.g., Executive Suite, Woman's World. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, this may be the most critically...
...What is misunderstood is that the film hews to the line of what is known or can be reliably surmised...
...The emphasis upon the earlier part of Alexander's career, and the glossing over of his probable later insanity, may make the film seem hurried towards the close...
...Running two-and-a-half hours, the film nevertheless has been severely cut in certain portions...
...Some Cinerama theaters may be closed after the run of this presentation, ostensibly for "economic reasons" having to do with the shortage of films which can be shown in the Cinerama process...
...Ewen Montagu, who conceived the plan, published a fascinating account of the episode a few years ago...
...There are many good performances in the huge cast, but much of the film's success is due to the portrayals of Fredric March as Philip of Macedon, and Richard Burton as his son Alexander...
...The plane of presentation rises from innocuous vulgarity to shoddily synthetic tourism, as in a thoroughly phony sequence of girls dancing in a Japanese garden, or a trite story gratuitously attached to a sequence of the Marian Year celebration in St...
...But the constantly engrossing drama, necessarily episodic, vindicates an approach that eschews fictionalizing for imaginative reconstruction...
...But the existing whole is a recreation of the ancient world and mind that is amazingly faithful and believable...
...The color, however, is subdued—as are the other elements, in the British style of developing dramatic power through understatement...
...Lowell Thomas announces, "Here I am at the Great Pyramids," or the Taj Mahal, or some other scenic marvel...
...The third Cinerama presentation continues the deterioration of this truly spectacular medium to the level of an aggrandized amateur travelogue...
...Peter's...
...But director-producer-writer Robert Rossen achieves a sense of history to the last that is unique and authentic...
...The Man Who Never Was...
...Author Rod Serling's cynicism about business projects a deeper cynicism about people, who create and perpetuate the patterns which determine their lives...
...Deeply conceived and powerfully projected, their performances stress complexity of thought and feeling, bringing two of the proverbial leaders of history to believable life...
...But in the end, even after Begley has broken and died in the battle for his own self-respect and for a humane policy towards employes, Heflin ambitiously chooses the machine, with its pattern that the prizes belong to the strong and the capable—if they are also unscrupulous...
...Amid constant spectacle, there are no Hollywood spectacular-isms—which has led some critics to complain mistakenly about the cloudy motivations of Alexander, Philip, Olym-pias, and others...
...One of the most gigantically splendid film spectacles ever made is also—most wondrous of all—the most scrupulous in historiography...
...The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, this may be the most critically cynical...
...Neame has stated his regret that the picture was made in color— and he is correct...
...Alexander the Great...
...This was done by planting the body of a man who apparently had been a major of marines on the coast of Spain, where the Germans could gain access to the spurious documents he was carrying...
...They have been successfully overcome in the film directed by Ronald Neame, with Clifton Webb playing Montagu...
...One of the most amazing triumphs of military intelligence in the history of warfare was the British feat in 1943 of diverting German attention from Sicily as an Allied invasion point...
...Hardly an incident or detail does not comport, at least as good guesswork, with the classical sources or modern scholarship...
...More likely reasons are the by now numerous other widescreen systems, showing narrative films—and the worsening quality of what the Cinerama people offer in competition...
...Reproducing the format of its two television presentations, director Fielder Cook concentrates on a small group of principals, Van Heflin, Ed Begley, Everett Sloane...
...Neame's deftly realistic technique, however, creates a fascinating film—the more remarkable because its central outlandish incident was the truth...
...black and white would have assisted its documentary credibility...
...Excellent " performances produce a crisp economy of dramatic presentation...
...Webb's performance, too, is stiff, supercilious, and a little grating in places where he gets in the way of what is supposed to be his own story...
...Telling the story in film, however, presented enormous problems: of dramatic focus, characterization, and narrative continuity...
...A fictional addition to Montagu's account, dealing with the attempt to check upon the ruse by an Irish agent of the Germans, is generally advantageous—except for the miscasting of Gloria Grahame, whose exaggerated mannerisms almost destroy the acceptibility of the episode...
...Heflin agonizes about driving Begley out of his job, under the cold prodding of Sloane...
...Seven Wonders op the World...
...Beatrice Straight, and Elizabeth Wilson, in developing the drama of people seemingly caught in the impersonally cruel pattern of immensely institutionalized corporate life...
...The unknown is left unknown, the dubious remains so...
Vol. 20 • May 1956 • No. 5
