Word: attics
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Toys in the Attic. Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin try to breathe life into Lillian Hellman's play, but the story about Dixie spinsters who indulge in a bit of brother-smothering is about as believable as Southern-fried matzo balls...
Toys in the Attic. Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin try to breathe life into Lillian Hellman's play, but the story about Dixie spinsters who indulge in a bit of brother-smothering is about as believable as Southern-fried matzo balls...
Toys in the Attic. Lillian Hellman's story about two Southern spinsters and their younger brother is the same tangle of tormented sibling relationships it was on the stage in 1960 and just as lacking in life, though Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin try valiantly to give it spark...
Toys in the Attic. Playwright Lillian Hellman is like a small, scared Racine. Her lines flip into the mind like well-aimed darts. Her scenes stack like well-designed dishes. Unhappily, there is seldom much nourishment in them. Hellman speaks her mind brilliantly but opens her heart rarely. When the moment requires feeling, she too often offers irony; when the theme invites tragedy, she resorts to melodrama; when the problem demands experiment, she is careful to be commercial. She is exciting but not moving. She writes superbly about sex but badly about love. She creates grand characters but not real...
...with this picture. It is cold, mechanical, dead. The central situation is contrived, and the characters are about as sincerely Southern as a bouquet of nylon magnolia blossoms. Playwright Hellman left New Orleans when she was still a child, and time has strewn cobwebs on the toys in her attic...