Word: bergen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...here. In one of them, a sober and artistically respectable novelist named Liz Hamilton (Jacqueline Bisset) fights several decades of writer's block to emerge, finally, as an archetype of contemporary feminist dissatisfactions. In the other film, her best friend and worst rival, Merry Noel Blake (Candice Bergen), is a sort of magnolia-dipped Judith Krantz. She writes money-making trash and leads a life to match her art. She does not end up any happier than her pal, but she certainly has more...
Credit for this must go largely to its stars. Under the permissive encouragement of 82-year-old George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story, Little Women, Born Yesterday), who has been urging female stars to be their best selves for half a century, Bisset is deliberately recessive, Bergen deliberately excessive, and neither has ever been better. The former is a subtle bundle of wariness and vulnerability, and if the screenwriter actually knew how real writers talk, this might have been one of the best portrayals of a working artist ever placed onscreen. There is also a scene in which for no special...
...Bergen, her progress from dithery housewife putting fantasies on paper to multimedia celebrity, living out the American fantasy of success, is gorgeously bold. Her bravura is entirely selfconscious, but this once bland beauty has become one of the screen's most arresting comedians. Somehow she manages to stay likable-maybe even lovable-no matter how her character uses and abuses friends and relatives on her way to the top, which is defined here as a good old-fashioned suite in the Waldorf Towers...
...four "oral history" booths worked nonstop taping individual tales of the Holocaust. An entire day was taken up by meetings of the 600 children of survivors who had come along. One was Menachem Rosensaft, 33, a New York lawyer who was born in a displaced-person camp at Bergen-Belsen, "a few hundred yards from the mass grave where Anne Frank was buried." Rosensaft is a leader of a second-generation survivor group: "We want to fight antiSemitism, to do something. The last time people burned synagogues no one did anything...
...latest project is a weekly talk show for the new Jewish National Television hookup, which goes to 50 cable outlets and a potential audience of 1.5 million. The Rebbetzin's first show dealt with the Nazi Holocaust. Said Jungreis, who spent a year in Bergen-Belsen: "We must learn to speak of the unspeakable, to answer the unanswerable. We are a nation that actually descended into the abyss of hell and yet retained a spark of divinity...