Director John Frankenheimer makes this beautiful and forgotten film about a troupe of air acrobats. The melancholy idle spin of lives that pay a high price for risk
John Frankenheimer is a director to be rediscovered. In the course of 43 years of work and 28 films he has told many different Americas especially in the 60s. With political fiction (“Go and kill”, “7 days in May”, “Diabolical Operation”) tried to explain the reasons for so many murders. In his production there is also room for provincial melancholy (“And the wind blew the fog away») Of which it also belongs «The daredevils»To see tonight, Monday 9 August, where you can find the actor who has worked with him the most, Burt Lancaster, from“Man from Alcatraz” al “Train», Starring with Deborah Kerr and Gene Hackman in this beautiful and forgotten film about a troupe of air acrobats working in a small town in Kansas.
“The daredevils”, the film twice Oscar (music by Elmer Bernstein, the special visual effects of Joseph McMillan Johnson) has an unsurpassed technical cast: in the aerial sequences Carl Boenisch jumped with a parachute shooting the acrobatics. We speak, as the original title suggests, of gypsies, wanderers, a team of paratroopers, daring in fact, who are preparing for their daring show. But everything is complicated by sentimental turmoil: Joe, Gene Hackman, falls in love with a dancer from a topless bar and Mike (Burt Lancaster) falls in love with Elizabeth (Deborah Kerr in a daring scene, an encore later “From here to eternity,” always with Burt) while preparing for a very difficult stunt.
The rest must be seen not only in the editing of a reckless direction but also in psychology, in that melancholy idleness of a life that pays a high price to risk. For Lancaster an ad hoc role (a few years earlier he had been Gattopardo!) And the cast masters a beautiful script, where a certain America is told in disillusionment. The interest lies more in what Frankenheimer suggests rather than in the acrobatic story, they are the disappointments of a life, constant in the great American literature, just note the affinity of the film with «The trapezium of life “ by Douglas Sirk based on a novel by Faulkner.
The Daredevils, by John Frankenheimer, 1969; Rete4 at 4.40 pm
August 8, 2021 (change August 8, 2021 | 20:24)
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