Reiner and Shevelove made the tricky material both tasteful and amusing.
People are more likely to say yes to tricky material when a star is interested.
This hard-headed attitude is a constant in Scott's career, when he has found himself working with tricky material.
It's unexpectedly good, and astute enough to avoid alienating churchgoing audiences in the US by its sensitive handling of tricky material.
But the sense that this story doesn't end when the movie does, and that what unfolds on screen flows into the world beyond, is due to how the director Oliver Schmitz has approached this tricky material.
William Nicholson's intelligent screenplay deals admirably with this tricky material, presenting anti-apartheid violence in context of the constant, brutal violence the white supremacist regime was meting out to black South Africans.
Again, no big names here, but a highly professional and slick cast work their way through some tricky material, which could easily be played for melodrama or cheap laughs but somehow strikes the right balance.
As the founding myth of biblical Israel, this could be controversial territory, but Scott has successfully handled this type of tricky material before, in the crusades movie Kingdom of Heaven, and we expect him to be as agile here as before.
SALLY SILVERS has immersed herself in tricky material for her new dance, "Yessified!" This work, which will be performed at Performance Space 122 beginning on Sunday, delves into race: specifically, how, as a white, liberal downtown choreographer from Tennessee, she could explore whiteness and blackness.
