Word: abbesses
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...THIS UNSCATHING satire, Glenda Jackson is running for abbess of the convent against Felicity (Susan Penhaligon), a young nun who preaches a platform of free love. With the help of her Haldeman-Ehrlichman like cronies (Geraldine Page and Anne Jackson), Jackson engineers a scheme to record her rival's conversations and steal love letters from her sewing basket. Naturally, the Jesuits hired to filch the evidence are caught in the act, and the nuns decide on cover-up rather than confession...
...burning was exactly what she had done with it. Gone was the somber exuberance of such earlier triumphs as Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means. The froth turned sour and her amused awareness of human daffiness was drowned in simple venom. The Abbess of Crewe (1974), Spark's deft parody of Watergate set in an English convent, gave reason to hope that all was not lost. The Takeover proves that nothing has been lost...
That gremlin with the Groucho stash is really Sandy Dennis, disguised as a payoff man in the movie The Abbess. Based on Novelist Muriel Spark's spoof of Watergate, The Abbess of Crewe, the film features Dennis, Melina Mercouri and Geraldine Page as nuns engaging in some unholy intrigue. Says Sandy: "I play a not very bright sister who talks loudly and does what my mother used to call 'all the grunt work' " -including the delivery of hush money to a men's room in Philadelphia. At that point, justice triumphs, and Sandy is nabbed...
...about Sister Alexandra? The Lady Abbess is said to be the descendant of 14 generations of English aristocrats. She is austerely beautiful, witty and devilishly good at poetry (when the tapes are transcribed, the documents are dotted with the notation: "Poetry deleted"). Crazed, yes; contemptuous of the rest of humanity, yes. But a parody of Whatchamacallem? Hardly...
...happy fact, of course, is that a send-up as elaborate as this takes on a delight of its own. The close tie to a real-life political absurdity eventually becomes a hindrance, but The Abbess of Crewe is a wonderful joke while it lasts...