Word: bancroft
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This kind of material works best uncinematized -- a radio play with its own gentle celluloid night-light. But Screenwriter Hugh Whitemore and Director David Jones have thrown in trips to Central Park, vignettes of the Doels doing house chores. And Anne Bancroft has provided Helene, a native of Pennsylvania, with a Noo Yawk accent that rasps on the ear. She hurls apostrophes to the walls and abuse at her typewriter. One sighs: Relax, Anne, you got the job. As Frank, though, Anthony Hopkins gets the job done. With shrewd understatement, he fills out the portrait of a man who demands...
Like Frank Doel, Stephanie Anderson in Duet for One has the plucky, soldiering-on English temperament. Beneath it, however, is a violin virtuoso's rage at being felled by multiple sclerosis. The role, played on Broadway by Bancroft, now extracts one of Julie Andrews' strongest performances. Fighting the disease and its accompanying despair, stoking her own infidelity and her husband's, displaying the terminal patient's luxury of being both noble and bitter, Andrews transforms Tom Kempinski's case history into a metaphor for middle age. Stephanie could be any careerist facing a mid-life crisis of confidence...
...kept travelers away from Haiti, and last week the 89-year-old hotel closed its doors. All its furnishings are being put up for sale, but modern-day Haitians do not seem particularly interested in relics from a bygone era. The brightly painted wooden nameplates that identified the Anne Bancroft Suite and other celebrity rooms went for $4 each, and the famed mahogany bar remains unsold despite its modest asking price...
...dramatically less riveting, emotionally more subtle matter: an archetypally vexatious mother-daughter relationship. In adapting play to screen, Norman and Director Tom Moore have been somewhat undone by their new medium's imperatives. The realism of camera close-ups turns probability into utter implausibility. And the casting of Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, who cannot help projecting intelligence and the will to prevail, is inimical to the story's cause. Still, the painful honesty of the play's psychological observations survives and remains worthy of attention...
...overweight, frumpy rural homebody, Bancroft's Thelma is an inspired interpretation. Unable to make Jessie's existential leap of imagination into the great beyond, she nonetheless struggles to meet her halfway. As a mother, she is unable to let her go without a fight. As the evening wears on, however, she is forced to realize that for Jessie, survival is out of the question...