I Am a Camera [VHS]

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(3 stars) - LEICA A LOT..........!
NOW, when this one hit the big screen about half a century ago! What a Stirr!

THEN it was followed by the musical and that 'other movie' - also excellent. This one resonates perhaps just slightly more, more hints of 'actual'. Gone are the 'gorgeous people' ..... except maybe for Laurence Harvey as our Hero.

Justice to these Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood is still to come, still seeking the definitive version of this 'innocent abroad in pre-WWII Berlin and his subsequently peculiar, to say the least 'episodes' with waif Sally Bowles [Miss Harris - also quite devine] and the rest of the motley and tarnished boarding-house crew and other various inhabitants of the city. [Sex was never this fun in the Big City.]

Interesting to see Great Shelley Winters in the role so differently realized in Fosse's "Cabaret" - both views work, but Miss Winters is possibly more 'period perfect".

It seems like a great fuss was made about this movie some 50 years ago, compared to today's fare? Tame indeed, but it's time for a 're-visiting' of Mr. Isherwood's Berlin - so devine, so dark, so decadent!

(5 stars) - Brilliant Characterization of a Zany and Colorful Young Lady
Julie Harris mesmerized screen audiences along with Ethel Waters in "Member of the Wedding." Harris provides a brilliant characterization of zany, madcap, but always interesting, totally effervescent and colorful Sally Bowles in "I am a Camera." The film is an adaptation of the John Druten play, which was in turn adapted from Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories."

Laurence Harvey does a convincing job as the man saddled with the well-nigh impossible job of keeping up with the peripatetic, endlessly energetic Harris. He plays Christopher Isherwood, the actual author of the series of stories depicting Berlin in the days leading up to Hitler's accession to power. The picture conveys a feel for the period, with Isherwood, anything but the type who looks for fights, at one point getting into a brawl with Hitler brownshirts seeking to corral believers.

Shelley Winters performs convincingly in a supporting role. Henry Cornelius, who directed this British production, is also associated with the rollicking comedy "Passport to Pimlico" while the film's photographer, Guy Green, is one of the finest in cinema history, being teamed frequently with the great David Lean. Green won a Best Cinematography Oscar for Lean's "Great Expectations" and could easily have won one for another Lean Dickens classic, "Oliver Twist."

Sallys Bowles is a lady incapable of boring anyone. She keeps the action going at a frantic pace in this excellent film, from which Bob Fosse's great 1975 masterpiece "Cabaret" was adapted.

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