![]() ![]() Actually, there is one tan face in the crowd - Lee Marvin's. But this is tastefully done, giving you all the information you need in order to know what happened. A Makeup Department could have gone ape here - one cheek stuffed with cotton, bandages on his head, his face a welter of bruises. How tempting it must have been to make more of these possibilities. But we don't see it on screen, or hear it described. He's been clobbered by the KGB for the killing, you see. After he has killed a traitor who happened to be a man of considerable importance in the Soviet bureaucracy, he next shows up on screen with a small shiner the color of a storm cloud on one of his eyelids and a slight scab on his lower lip. He's just an earnest cop who can be beaten up, as he is several times. Hurt's character is nobody's idea of a superhero. His thin stringy hair has been blackened for some reason. William Hurt, likewise pale, even paler than usual come to think of it, is likewise nicely handled. In some later movie she played a vampire, I think, and I can see why she was cast. If her eyebrows were any darker she'd look like Audrey Hepburn in "Sabrina." As it is, with her blue eyes framed by those orbital rings and her chestnut curls cascading around her cheeks, she looks slightly predatory, maybe like a sable. She's pale too but she's given just enough eyeshadow or kohl or whatever it is, and her brows and lashes are emphasized just enough to make her look even more modelesque than she ordinarily would. If you want to see an example of what I mean, watch "A Time to Love and a Time to Die", the scene in which John Gaving as a German soldier returns from months at the front during the winter and takes a bath naked so we can all admire his muscles and that tan he sports all over his body, suggesting not November in Kursk but a summer at the beach in Zihuatanejo. The usual tendency is to pile on the suntan and make everyone glamorous. First off, everyone is pale, as they should be in the midst of a Russian winter. Viewers usually don't pay much attention to makeup unless it draws attention to itself but the makeup department should get a medal for this one. Not only doesn't Chief Investigator Hurt's cheesy looking compact car have a heater but his shoes are made partly of cardboard. Smith's novel was a bit more explicit about the material culture of Moscow than this movie is. When characters speak in outdoor scenes, their breath steams, though not always, so you can pretty much distinguish the scenes shot in the studio from those outside. Boy, it looks cold! Everyone seems to dress in multilayered dark clothing and the men wear Pelzkappe, those big furry caps. But I think it's the general milieu that is evoked by the location shooting, wardrobe, makeup, and art direction that makes this interesting. The plot, twisted and complicated as it is, is a bit hard to follow at times although it does make sense if you pay attention. For some reason I almost always watch this when it appears on cable TV. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |