★★★★★ An unbroken crane shot in Shooting Stars' opening scene, tracking movie starlet Mae Feather (Annette Benson) as she wanders from her own ground-level film set into the first-floor set of her lover's, easily matches both Goodfellas' restaurant scene and the opening sequence of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. It's an achievement made all the more impressive by both the technological limitations of the time and the fact that it was British director Anthony Asquith's debut film. Helping matters is Henry Harris and Stanley Rodwell's gorgeous cinematography, which uses expressionistic light and shadow that ironically plays with the boundaries between artificial sets and 'real' space, a theme that informs the film's central narrative. Indeed, Shooting Stars is at its most successful when it juxtaposes its stars' unhappy private lives with the artifice of public celebrity.
- 3/22/2016
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
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