Word: bancroft
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BERT RIGBY, YOU'RE A FOOL. Robert Lindsay (the London-Broadway star of Me and My Girl) plays the lead in Carl Reiner's funny fable about an English coal miner's search for celebrity. Anne Bancroft is glorious as a randy Hollywood princess whom Lindsay meets on the potholed road to stardom...
...honest chap, with a genuine passion for the great show-biz tunes and turns, Bert finally rebels against this demeaning chicanery. The reward for his pains: a trip to Hollywood and a chance to discover that its streets are paved with poseurs, among whom lurks a comically glorious Anne Bancroft, playing a randy Beverly Hills princess...
Megamillionaires with a willed fortune are often ambivalent about it. Inheriting Dow Jones stock now worth $150 million, recalls Christopher Bancroft, was like winning an elephant in a raffle: "I didn't know what the hell to do with it." Laura, a fourth-generation Rockefeller whose maiden name is hidden behind two marriages, remembers her family's vast compound as a "verdant cage." A psychiatric social worker, she happily gives away her inherited income to favorite causes like the Children's Defense Fund...
...these customers is Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft), a free-spirited New York script reader forever on the lookout for classic volumes of poetry and prose at affordable prices. One day she comes across an advertisement for Marks and Co. in the Saturday Review, and pens the first letter of what will become a two-decade-long correspondence between herself and the various employees of Marks...
This premise, quite a literary one, seems at first unsuited for treatment on the big screen. The sparse dialogue shares time with voice-overs by Bancroft and Hopkins reading aloud the amusing epistolary interchanges between their characters. Perhaps correctly sensing the thinness of the letters gimmick, screenwriter Hugh Whitmore tries to flesh out the story by including little vignettes of Hanff and Dole's lives...