Word: begley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sweet Bird of Youth. Tennessee Williams' Bird was an artistic turkey on Broadway, but as directed by Richard Brooks it makes a noisy and sometimes brilliant peacock of a picture. Paul Newman and Ed Begley are excellent, and Geraldine Page as an aging cinemama blazons a memorable skidmark on the go-away-and-don't-come-back trail...
Figuring to show the home folks what a big fish he has caught, he Caddies her down to the small Southern town where he grew up. The big blowhard is unaware that on his last trip home he left the daughter of the state's political boss (Ed Begley) pregnant, and that she subsequently had an abortion. Now the political boss is a real mean man, and when he hears that the hero is in town...
Newman, as the young dog who is putting on the cat, creates a memorable portrait of a phony. Begley is pluperfect as the sort of jolly old political Santa who wouldn't harm a flea-he's much too busy squashing people. But the picture belongs to Actress Page, who starred with Newman in the Broadway play. She swirls to the girls' room as if to a coronation, she cuddles her oxygen mask as a normal woman might cuddle a newborn babe, she dimples in maidenly dither at her gigolo's advances, she proceeds a moment...
What really keeps things going on Rouben Ter-Arutunian's spare, strikingly lighted stage are the classic public combats between honest legislators and honest, honest lagos; the immemorial private confabs between men with one card up their sleeve and men with two; a burly Ed Begley and a determined Richard Kiley resisting the Devil; Kevin McCarthy's rabble-rousing; and the fanged drawl and deadly swoops of Henry Jones's Southern Senator. Advise and Consent never once cuts below the surface, but it does often get behind the scenes...
...ideas and players. Instead of Actor Muni there is Spencer Tracy, the Hollywooden archetype of the wise old man, who as the years and pictures go by acts less and less and looks more and more as though he had been carved out of Mount Rushmore. Instead of Ed Begley in the role of Bryan there is Fredric March, who has somehow been persuaded to portray that unbalanced genius of the spoken word as a low-comedy stooge who at the climax catches a faceful of agnostic...