Start Over

Focus: A Film Review (1950-1951)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

151 THE ADVENTURERS Starring: Dennis Price, Jack Hawkins, Siobhan McKenna, with Peter Hammond, Gregoire Aslan, Bernard Lee. Producer: Aubrey Baring. Director: David Macdonald. Distributors: G.F.D. Certificate : A. Category : B. Running time : 86 minutes. That a film should not be just like a lot of others is half the battle — or at least a quarter. And so I was pleased to find that this one was about South Africa during and after the Boer War. And I had another agreeable surprise. A horse had to be shot, to its owner’s great regret. I know how horses are shot in films, I thought. We shall hear the crack of the rifle and see the owner wince and avert his eyes. Well, we didn’t The adventures which the adventurers meet with are concerned with diamonds and gold mines and trekking across the trackless veldt. Siobhan McKenna has a small, tight-lipped part. She looked as if the whalebone, in which women were encased in those days, had entered into her very soul. Not an enthralling film, but an eminently decent one. Q. inferior dance bands and well worn gramophone records they still come up as smiling, fresh and breezy as ever. Not so the number called “Crazy Rhythm”, which I imagine is a modern addition. Displays of human degeneracy of this kind should only be permitted behind the bars of padded cells. With this exception this musical is a jolly affair, with Doris Day pleasantly performing, but regrettably lapsing into crooning at times, when she is singing “straight”. Gordon MacRae does nofr risk his reputation in this way, and sings seriously and well, while S. Z. Sakall’s humour bubbles and sparkles throughout the show. He loses his fortune, but he steals the picture. G. TRAVELLERS’ JOY Starring: Googie Withers, John McCallum, with Yolande Donlan. Producer: Antony Damborough. Director: Ralph Thomas. Distributors: G.F.D. Certificate : A. Category : B. Running time : 78 minutes. Since a book can be called a best seller, a play might be called a best runner. And now another best runner has been transferred to the screen. But one feels that the story of the ingenuity of British visitors to Sweden, who have exhausted their currency, has not gained by the absence of Yvonne Arnaud. Yolande Donlan gives a very good characterisation of a come-hithering American blonde whom one would go miles to avoid. Dora Brvan, always a good actress, is excellent in the part of a Swedish maid. The script is clean and straightforward, if only rarely witty. The divorcified atmosphere is duly cleared, for the divorced couple are happily reunited and the dialogue makes it clear (though not, of course, in so many words) that no one has committed adultery. In fact the only fault I have to find with this comedy is that on the whole it is not particularly funny. Q. Doris Dav