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Tamango
I haven't seen this legendary and rarely screened French film in 'Scope, but it should be well worth checking out. Director John Berry was a longtime member of Orson Welles's Mercury repertory company, working as an actor on stage and radio and sometimes as a director; because he was also a communist, his promising Hollywood career as a film director (From This Day Forward, He Ran All the Way) was cut short by the blacklist. He emigrated to France, where he spent most of the remainder of his career, though he returned to the U.S. in the 70s to make, among other films, the wonderful ghetto comedy Claudine. Tamango (1957), loosely based on a story by Prosper Merimée, is set aboard a slave ship, bound illegally for Cuba, where a slave revolt breaks out. Dorothy Dandridge plays a slave who's the mistress of the ship's captain (Curt Jurgens); others in the cast include Alex Cressan (as the leader of the revolt) and Jean Servais. |
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