Word: bathtubful
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...Like the bathtub, a telephone can be found in nearly every American home, and, until now, it has been equally taken for granted. Yet, all of a sudden, consumers are being urged to jettison their old view of the phone as a utilitarian item and look at it as a fancy new entry on a shopping list. Local Bell System companies, as well as AT&T's brand-new baby, American Bell Inc., are beseeching customers to buy telephones instead of leasing them, and even to plug more of them into their homes. Department, specialty and discount stores...
Nothing much happens. Charles' only friend Sam loses his job as a jacket salesman and moves in. His mother, alternately in a silver lame dress, bathtub, or asylum, has a bad habit of attempting suicide. Susan, the fresh-faced younger sister, "always appears to be happy and normal. She must know something," he muses. Reminders of the Sixties lie sprinkled about: Janis Joplin on the car radio, references to Woodstock--according to Susan, "Just a bunch of people walking around in the mud looking for a place to pee." But these bits of nostalgia are carefully controlled, contributing...
...extraordinary items and use them to lend a glamorous cachet to listings of tableware and nightgowns. Neiman-Marcus, for instance, has offered everything from his-and-her airplanes to a paleontological safari in Utah to baby Asian elephants. Sakowitz, its Texas rival, has presented such opulent entries as a bathtub full of diamonds, a chateau in a French wine district and a personalized offshore oil rig. This year proves to be reliably rich in the wish books...
Especially disappointing is the lack of atmosphere throughout most of the film. Herzog spent years laboring in the Amazon, but for all that, Fitzcarraldo might just as well have been filmed on some Berlin soundstage, or even in a bathtub. There are some nice shots of the boat gliding along, framed by rosy-gray sunsets, but nothing that Marlo Perkins couldn't have shown us. Fitzcarraldo's guest is acted out in such grandiloquently theatrical terms that even the mighty Amazon gets relegated to the status of a cardboard backdrop...
These characters are all placed against the backdrop of a land of illusion and decadence. Alex and Jerry check into the Dr. Zhivago suite at the MGM Grand, complete with sunken bathtub, a mirror over the bed, and a doorbell that plays the theme from the film which gives the room its name. This is Las Vegas in all its tacky splendor, a world which no one in the films seems to take seriously...