Word: birney
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...SCREENPLAY strains with the Kennedy model and an intrusive Hollywood morality. But the excellences in character acting balance any such flaws. Melvyn Douglas, a reliable old pro, plays the aging, once powerful Senator Birney, whose friendship Tynan must betray. Alda's best moments come when he is Douglas's foil; Tynan feels contempt for the old man's politics but cannot help sympathizing when Birney lapses into senility and the Cajun tongue of his youth. Rip Torn plays a hilarious cameo as the libidinous buffoon, Sen. Ritner...
...friends drop in unexpectedly from Cambridge, a brother-sister duo of unblemished Wasp credentials-or "white people" in Papa's olive-pure lingo. Francis goes into a panic of sexual ambivalence. The sister (Carol Potter) is crazy about him and Francis is queer for her brother (Reed Birney), or so he fears. What ensues, with no little assistance from some wacky neighbors, is a zinging display of comic fireworks, most of which explode underfoot...
...move forward only part way toward Juliet's lips before he falls back dead, thus showing that the apothecary's drugs not only "are quick" but are a good deal quicker than he expected. To the very end this Romeo lacks the experience to deal with everything that arises. Birney's is a performance of beauty, ardor, and passion. Who would have thought the young man to have had so much blood...
...David Birney, a star of that awful TV comedy series Bridget Loves Bernie, is no longer a teenager; but he proves able to act like one throughout the show. His small size is a help here, and he's good-looking to boot. He is as lithe and exhibitionistic as a highschool athlete, easily scaling a locked eight-foot gate, dashing up the wall to Juliet's balcony, and dangling from it by one hand...
Puppets might supply more emotion than these actors do. There is only one stridently monotonous note in Roberta Maxwell's voice box. Her Juliet is a fishwife haggling unsuccessfully over a flounder rather than a young girl losing the world and her dear life for love. David Birney's Romeo is so limp and bland that it comes as a wondrous surprise that he has either the will or strength to climb to Juliet's balcony. Mercutio, that man from whom words flow like liquid light, emerges in David Rounds' rendering as little more than...