Word: alison
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Jimmy is a furious, destructive, viciously witty and deeply troubled young man (rather like Hamlet), with few concessions made to the sensibilities of a family audience; and yet (again like Hamlet) he elicits a paradoxical sympathy and respect. His subtle three-cornered relationship with his wife Alison and their friend Cliff is still credible and touching, though much less deeply probed than in the play...
Even the faults of the movie are largely those of the play. Mr. Osborne believes, and tells us, that the difficulties in the Porter marriage are due to Alison's shortcomings as well as Jimmy's, but this is never embodied dramatically: she appears as a worn, long-suffering patsy for Jimmy's tirades, with no vices or bitcheries to balance his, and no problems except Jimmy. In their brief moments of loving communion, Mr. and Mrs. Porter like to pretend that he is a jolly super bear and she a bushy-tailed squirrel--an odd and embarrassing touch...
Richard Burton plays Jimmy perfectly straight, without the bitter elan and charm of Kenneth Haigh's stage performance. His approach to Jimmy's tirades is a bit too far on the heavy-breathing side for complete conviction, but he has a craggy, intense, remarkably expressive face. Mary Ure's Alison--a role which she created--is fragile, appealing, slightly vapid, and very, very blonde...
...young university graduate educated beyond his background through the goodness of the welfare state, frustrated in a nation living in twilight, a second-class citizen in a society where the first-class citizens "spend their time mostly looking forward to the past." He has captured his wife Alison (Mary Ure) from the enemy above. With her and his business partner (excellently played by Gary Raymond), he lives in an attic in a Midlands town so bleak that it seems to smell of soft coal and leftover herring. There, University Man Porter runs a sweets stall in the marketplace, when...
...revival of Alison's House, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Susan Glaspell in 1931, showed us some writing that could not get by in the theatre today; but the story, based on the mysterious life of poetess Emily Dickinson, is inherently dramatic and playworthy. A woman also wrote the group's next offering, The Chalk Garden. Enid Bagnold's play about two interlocking struggles is a good deal better than Miss Glaspell...