Word: billetdoux
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...unrelievedly romantic style has overemphasized his mawkish plots. Here he seems at times to be kidding himself. The zestful air of holiday and discovery is irresistible. If Antonioni's Zabriskie Point was a poison-pen letter to America, then Love Is a Funny Thing is a distinctively Gallic billetdoux that turns the entire continent into a joyful landscape for lovers...
Tchin-Tchin has been adapted by Sidney Michaels from a French play by François Billetdoux. A wildly incompatible man and woman, betrayed by their respective spouses, meet to cut their emotional losses, and manage to lose everything else they have. At its core, the play is a Christian existential fable; on its surface it is a chiaroscuro of magical moods. Whenever the play is too fragile to carry them, its two stars, Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn, impressively carry the play...
Tchin-Tchin, which Sidney Michaels adapted from a French play by François Billetdoux, is a wry, tender, amusing, pathetic fable about a wildly incompatible man and woman who come together to pool their emotional losses. Caesario Grimaldi (Anthony Quinn) is an Italian-American contractor, as coarse and gravelly as raw concrete. Pamela Pew-Pickett (Margaret Leighton) is as properly British as the hyphen in her name. When they meet by appointment in a Rockefeller Center restaurant, he sloshes through double Scotches and she sips tea. But he is a wounded animal and she is a shattered teacup...
...spite of all that memorableness, there's an awful lot of fat on this double tchin. Sidney Michaels, its perpetrator, pretends to have "based" his work on a play by Francois Billetdoux (French for Frank Mashnote). Billetdoux did not confuse ambiguity with vagueness and confusion--something Michaels has very conveniently managed to do. The third act, in particular, is a mess. Leighton and Quinn have renounced their money (are completely destitute, in fact), have no place to go and nothing to do (they aren't even married), yet Michaels seems to think he has achieved some sort of brilliantly whimsical...
...soon be claiming that he is this or that character in Banderol, since the play centers around a studio production boss and was written by Dore Schary, ex-production boss at M-G-M (Oct. 9). Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton star in an adaptation of François Billetdoux's Tchin-Tchin (the word equals hello or goodbye, like ciao in Italian), a tale about lovers who meet as a result of a love affair between his wife and her husband (Oct. 18) A limited-run production of Sheridan's The School for Scandal opens on Broadway...