Word: alda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wife in Manhattan, she was chilling and funny, and an exquisite counterpoise to the agitated femininity of Diane Keaton. In The Seduction of Joe Tynan, she was utterly convincing, cornpone accent and all, as the other woman, a Southern civil rights lawyer who falls in love with Alan Alda, a liberal Senator from New York. But to be convincing is merely to be competent, and Streep managed to give enough humanity to a routine role that when the cardboard Senator predictably told her that he was returning to his cardboard wife, viewers worried about what would become of the seductress...
...chanted in New York, prayed in Atlanta, held candlelight vigils in Fort Lauderdale. The stars came out in Los Angeles (Singer Helen Reddy), in Boston (Author Jules Feiffer) and in Denver (former First Lady Betty Ford). In Washington, D.C., a crowd of 2,500 cheered when Actor Alan Alda declared: "You don't have to be conservative to be against ERA, you just have to be wrong...
...Four Seasons is Alan Alda's promising, if imperfect directorial debut. The promise and the very real pleasures of the film derive from its eagerness to explore the mid-life passage with good-humored civility. Alda is particularly good at examining the male sensibility. Cariou's philanderer is troubled by the directions in which his sexuality has driven him, puzzled by the ways in which marriage has ill used his wife as well as himself. Weston's worrier is rich and touching as it becomes clear that his comic fussings over his diet and his money...
...Alda is less secure in dealing with the women. Moreno has no role. The Sandy Dennis character is excessively loony even for a person caught up in the crisis of separation. Except for the confrontation scene with Alda, Carol Burnett is a bystander, but without being intrusive, she creates an appealing character through her intelligent responses to the action swirling about her. But it is Armstrong, playing the young intruder, who gets to comment on the habits and assumptions of these old friends and so has the best female role...
...that as a writerdirector, Alda is too eager to please. He goes for big laughs where a small smile would perhaps be truer to the rueful mood he tries to establish. One feels he is sometimes easing away from the tougher implications of his tale. There is also an empty prettiness to his shooting, especially in the transitions from season to season. Still, American movies are rarely as alert as The Four Seasons is to the tensions implicit in friendship, to the social conventions by which people try to control the anxieties of ordinary life, and one cannot help responding...