THE 4 HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1962)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Vincente Minnelli

SCREENWRITER: Robert Ardrey, John Gay

FILM STARS: Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, Paul Lukas, Yvette Mimieux, Karl Boehm, Paul Henreid, Paul Lukas, Nestor Paiva, George Dolenz

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Four Square

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1962

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1916

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: War, Drama

WORDS: The famous novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez updated from just before and during World War 1 to just before and during World War 2. The book, written in 1916 was a best seller in the US in 1919 and was made into a famous silent film with Rudolph Valentino in 1921. The film is a big scale domestic drama with a war backdrop (it tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian landowner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the war which is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Plague (or Conquest), War, Famine, and Death. It is multi charactered with lots of drama and colour … which director Minelli was an expert on. It’s not perfect. I love Glenn Ford though he may be miscast. Glenn’s persona, outside the western, is “modern” and twitchy, and not without a contemporary neurosis or two which doesn’t work is this sort of (wartime) soap. Though if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were coming you’d by twitchy. (I’m undecided – I will have to watch it again). It’s also way long but it is engrossing and I don’t mind a heightened multi character soap opera. I haven’t read the novel.

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