Word: bisset
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hollywood labelled Cukor "the woman's director," because he presented women in his films, like Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, as strong, commanding human beings. His men frequently took the passive role, and Rich and Famous takes this further, into the realm of a feminist film. Jacqueline Bisset, the film's star, also co-produced it, which may help explain why this "Cukor Film" sees men with feminine eyes...
Cukor and Bisset spread before the audience lavishly lit shots of male musculature curving with sinuous grace, while Bisset's now famous breasts (remember the poster for The Deep?) remain unexposed, indeed, barely acknowledged by the costume designer. Bisset herself gives a bold yet detailed performance, wariness creeping into her observed glance, frustration, anger and love expressively clogging her voice. Unfortunately, Bisset's creation, the character of Liz Hamilton, novelist, stands out from the otherwise murky mess created by Gerald Ayres' screenplay. Unintentionally, despite the laughs, Rich and Famous becomes a tragedy of a fascinating woman with neither a friend...
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...
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...
...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 one past this dreary consistency just as it does the movie...