Word: burstyn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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They try to exorcise loneliness by seeking some point or purpose in their lives. Olga (Rosemary Harris) idealistically teaches school but dreams of a home and family. Miserable in her marriage to a pedantic schoolmaster (Rex Robbins), Masha (Ellen Burstyn) stumbles into a hopeless, heart-wrenching affair with the garrison's Lieut. Colonel Vershinin (Denholm Elliott). The youngest sister, Irina (Tovah Feldshuh), seeks to be ennobled by the "dignity of work" in the local telegraph office...
...permanent repertory troupe. It consists of players whose passion is the theater and who possess talents of the highest distinction. Rosemary Harris could mesmerize an audience by reciting the multiplication table. Tovah Feldshuh is a steel butterfly, a young actress of electrifying presence and promise. As Masha, Ellen Burstyn lacks some consuming sensual hunger, but her parting embrace with Vershinin is a silent, agonized howl of lost love...
...artistic fantasies through which he carries out his suspicions, guilt jealousy and resentment toward his family. Gielgud's son, who is his fantasmagoria becomes a monstrously callous and emotionless lawyer and husband, is played with cruel, aristocratic brilliance by Dirk Bogard; the casting could not have been better. Ellen Burstyn, meanwhile, does not quite convince as the lawyer's wife; she's supposed to growl like a trapped domestic pet and take gleeful pleasure in taking on a lover to spite her husband, but somehow Burstyn comes on like Dinah Shore trying to play Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate...
ALREADY two different levels of reality appear at work--the "normal" interaction of these characters and Gielgud's obvious interpolations, his artistic mistakes. Gielgud is perfect here, capturing the petulance of the artist whose creative instincts have gone awry. In one scene, Burstyn unintentionally speaks in Gielgud's voice. In another, Warner's brother, a noted footballer, jogs through a bedroom, where Stritch and Bogarde are conversing, on his way to the bathroom. The funniest of these sequences occurs between Burstyn and Warner. As they sit on a park bench together, Warner exclaims with surprise, "I've got an erection...
Gielgud is now less an author than a very tired old man in the last throes of illness, waiting for his family to reunite for an outdoor dinner in this picture-postcard setting. When they arrive, they are hardly what we have anticipated. Burstyn and Bogarde are happily married, and Warner, now clearly identified as Gielgud's bastard son, is on good terms with them both. Bogarde remains a seeker after moral language, but the hatred he supposedly bears his father as a result of his mother's death looms largely as a projection of Gielgud's own moral discomfort...