Word: bannen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JOHNNY BELINDA (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Mia Farrow stars as the victimized deaf-mute in a TV production of Johnny Belinda. With Barry Sullivan, Ian Bannen and David Carradine...
Sailor promotes the feeling of a mal-de-mare's nest from the beginning. That most shopworn of all modern literary figures, Alienated Man (Ian Bannen), is on vacation in Italy, accompanied by his mistress, played with leggy lassitude by Vanessa Redgrave. Her British banalities suddenly bug Bannen, and he tells her to buzz off. The very next day he picks up a new playmate, a mysterious and wealthy Frenchwoman (Jeanne Moreau). Playing her customary erotic neurotic, with pouting mouth and matching accessories, Moreau is searching for a young sailor she had an affair with years before...
...seen it asleep at your side, you never forget it. It changes you." Obviously it has changed her for the worse. Throughout the film she expresses views that never graduate to the sophomoric: "He wanted the big cities, the bright lights . . . I was just a woman." To the lumpish Bannen she remarks: "I like you to be like this . . . like a stone wall...
...trails after the sailor, she and the stone wall traipse from Greece to Alexandria to dullest Africa, for no other reason, it seems, than to run into an overblown Levantine (Orson Welles) and a flyblown white hunter (Hugh Griffith). In the end the sailor remains unfound. Perhaps, ventures Bannen, this romantic ideal never existed. "But if he didn't," allows Moreau. "we would have had to invent him." Translation: We all need our illusions no matter how false we know they are. After seeing Tony Richardson's most recent flopdoodles-Mademoiselle, The Loved One, and now Sailor-moviegoers...
...picture of this quality the point is hardly worth arguing. The script, based on Howard Fast's pseudonymous potboiler about a light-fingered socialite, soon degenerates into a droll call of ancient wheezes that add up to a 97-minute heh. The actors (Natalie Wood, Dick Shawn, Ian Bannen, Peter Falk, Lila Kedrova) try hard to laugh it up, but most of the time they look the way the audience feels: like geese stuffed with chestnuts...