Word: alda
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...that perfectly assured actor Bob Hoskins; a leading man (Michael Caine) who comes alive only when he puts himself at risk, either by seducing other men's wives or by driving dangerously; a director (Saul Rubinek) whose perfect tastelessness is matched by his impenetrable egocentricity. Obviously Writer-Director Alda has not spent his spare time on television and movie sets on the phone with his agent. He has tuned in to the lunacies of his profession, and when Sweet Liberty is minding its own business--the movie business--it is on high comic ground...
...ordinary life that gives it trouble. In writing Burgess for himself, Alda has imbued the character with his own well-known and entirely admirable traits. He is intelligent and well spoken. He is kind and decent. He is a man of reason. He is also something of a bore. Alda lacks the air of dangerousness that movie stardom requires. That is why his great success as a performer has been on television, where week in, week out, agreeableness makes a star. In his last feature, The Four Seasons, however, he was successful because he integrated himself into an ensemble...
...Alda's rather dry and distant directorial style does not help. And as a writer he has not provided for himself as generously as he has for others. His romance with a teacher played by Lise Hilboldt, an actress whose plainness of manner amounts to a kind of self-cancellation, is dully conventional. And a subplot that involves them in an endlessly unfunny attempt to soothe the troubled spirit of Burgess's mad old mom is irrelevant and near to tasteless. She is played by Lillian Gish, and the movies' oldest pro clearly understands that she is trapped in Sweet...
After she had put the roses on the grave, Alda Sizemore commenced the story of how Old Red the coon dog got run over by a train. "It was just awful," she sighed, and then she said, "but let me go get my husband. He tells it so much better, and he was there, after...
...been bringing live roses here for ten years," Alda Sizemore said. "Ain't that terrible...