Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Landscape Suicide














Drum Beat (Delmer Daves, 1954) - Bertrand Tavernier said the film "has a breathtaking visual splendor that paradoxically underscores the meditative, melancholy quality of the best scenes and compensates for the weakness of the initial premise and the performances." I don't think I agree that the imagery completely makes up for an otherwise weak film; instead this seems to be a case of staccato bursts of gripping pictorial compositions stuck in a work that (overall) doesn't deserve them, like bits of food in aspic. But it is true that there seem to be many beautiful shots here. Best I can tell from my own imperfect digital copy, anyway. Some of these screengrabs hardly do the images justice, I'm sure.

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