Word: bergen
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Ayres based Rich and Famous on the Van Druen play, Old Acquaintance, also the title of the 1940s melodrama based on it which started Bette Davis and Miriam Hopks. In its newest incarnation, Ayres supposedly follows the two women, here, Bisset and Candace Bergen as her best friend, Merry Noel Blake, from their college days in '59 up through 1981. It traces their literary careers and sexual histories up to apparent collective midlife decisions to reject men as anything other than sexual toys and to reject their own work. Ayres clutters the original melodrama at side issues like the effect...
...case, Ayres condemns Bisset to remain alone. After the breakup of her marriage, Liz falls in with a pseudo-intellectual journalist who proposes to her; Bisset snipes at the offer, obviously afraid to commit herself to anyone, let alone this infant. Finally, after a conference with Bergen, the sole time we see Bergen at all supportive, Bisset decides to accept. She goes to meet him. There is some hint that her boyfriend Hart Bochner has involved himself with Bergen's daughter (the melodrama again), but the film never clarifies this point. It actually matters little. More importantly, he makes some...
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...
...entirely sexist to say that Rich and Famous, based on a famous "woman's picture," has not changed its thesis, however oddly it sometimes characterizes its leading ladies. What was implicit in the old film, namely that men are no good, is now painfully explicit. The husband Bergen sheds, once she begins her climb, is basically a nerd. The man Bisset finally decides might be all right-he is, in the current fashion, younger than she is and without a traditionally masculine brain wave-dumps her for her friend's daughter. The conviction of its stars, however carries...