Word: bisset
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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...
There are two movies going on 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...
...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...