| '1776' film reviews: Historically applauded or panned? | |
| Last Edit: WaymanWong 11:39 pm EDT 07/04/17 | |
| Posted by: WaymanWong 11:38 pm EDT 07/04/17 | |
| In reply to: re: 1776 film - Greg_M 11:27 pm EDT 07/04/17 | |
|
|
|
| Vincent Canby of the New York Times: "The music is resolutely unmemorable. The lyrics sound as if they'd been written by someone high on root beer, and the book is familiar history—compressed here, stretched there—that has been gagged up and paced to Broadway's not inspiring standards. Yet Peter H. Hunt's screen version of 1776 ... insists on being so entertaining and, at times, even moving, that you might as well stop resisting it. This reaction, I suspect, represents a clear triumph of emotional associations over material ... [It] is far from being a landmark of musical cinema, but it is the first film in my memory that comes close to treating seriously a magnificent chapter in the American history.'' Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times (who gave it 2 stars out of 4): "This is an insult to the real men who were Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest. ... The performances trapped inside these roles, as you might expect, are fairly dreadful. There are good actors in the movie (especially William Daniels as Adams and Donald Madden as John Dickinson), but they're forced to strut and posture so much that you wonder if they ever scratched or spit or anything. ... I can hardly bear to remember the songs, much less discuss them. Perhaps I shouldn't.'' |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: 1776 film - Michael_Portantiere 02:22 pm EDT 07/05/17 |
| Next: | re: '1776' film reviews: Historically applauded or panned? - ilw 11:23 am EDT 07/05/17 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.066049 seconds.