Word: balsam
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Rita's ophthalmologist husband (Martin Balsam) is stolid and bumbling, and she can rarely bear even his lightest touches. A son has drifted into homosexuality, a daughter tolerates Rita impatiently. Rita's relationship with her mother (etched in dry point with just the slightest drop of acid by Sylvia Sidney) has become a series of long, grumbly quarrels. Rita, in short, cannot connect properly or rewardingly with anyone she cares about...
...Miss Woodward, there is no more authentic, believably feminine spirit on the screen today. In Summer Wishes she is brittle, cold, hysterical, but above all a woman who knows that she is lost and is in desperate search of herself. It is a lovely performance, almost matched by Balsam. Cannily holding back until he revisits Bastogne, where he fought in World War II-and where he was last fully alive-he shows us the center of a character deeper, more mysterious than we had imagined...
...hands from time to time. The plot is infernally tangled and unrelieved by humor. There is a good, loud, nasty showdown in a subterranean garage, and an effectively brutal scene of a mass mob assassination. The Mafiosi, portrayed with almost parodistic seriousness by the likes of Martin Balsam and Alfred Ryder, hire Viet Nam veterans to do their dirty work, a bit of practicality that also passes for covert social comment. The Stone Killer concludes in sober fashion with a sermon on evil, which, we are told, is pervasive and unavoidable. Rather like Charles Branson-Michael Winner movies, apparently...
Jones confounds them all. He casts aside his prepared notes at his first press conference, glances balefully at Aides Martin Balsam and William Windom, and lets go with a series of scorching comments about South African racism. It seems that a young American black (George Stanford Brown) has been accused of attempting to assassinate the South African Defense Minister. He has confided to Jones that the whole thing is a frame-up, and Jones believes him, laying himself open for an international wrangle over extradition...
...comic attempts end there. Sometimes Lumet attempts to send up other movies: a one-sided encounter between Angelo and his paralyzed father is an inept parody of Jack Nicholson's monologue in Five Easy Pieces. The film also mercilessly mocks a homosexual antiques dealer, with Martin Balsam, as they say in Hollywood, "cast against the part...