Word: caesario
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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...
Their loss is deeply disordering. To Caesario, marriage was a garden. Now, he lives in an emotional jungle. To Pamela, marriage was a kind of clock. Now, she can no longer tell time. Jolted out of place and out of time, Caesario and Pamela try to solace each other with sex in the tawdry austerity of a Times Square hotel room. It is a hilarious and heartbreaking scene, and belongs triumphantly to Margaret Leighton. She slugs down one whisky after another, and dances like a puritan posing as a pagan. "This is rather exciting, really," she says in an unlevel...
Hopes become specters. In the second and final act, their spouses are in Las Vegas, ready to marry each other. Pamela has become a wino; Caesario is numbing himself with work. She invites him to staunch their mutual loneliness by living with her "like brother and sister" in her Manhattan "Garden of Eden." There, in an alcoholic fuddle, they sign away their last legal rights to their mates, to Pamela's income, to Caesario's business. At play's end they are Chaplinesque waifs living in the charmed circle of innocents that includes saints, children, drunkards...
Subliminally, Tchin-Tchin is a Christian existential fable. The action begins just before Christmas. In material terms, Caesario and Pamela lose everything. In spiritual terms, they die out to the world. Meaning crumbles with their marriages. Thrown into what existentialists call a "situation of extremity" and Christians call "peril of soul," they strive in the "Garden of Eden" for the conditions of Paradise, where Adam and Eve possessed nothing and enjoyed everything...
Tchin-Tchin is magical. It is also fragile, but it is saved from wispiness by Leighton and Quinn. Excellence is an acting habit with Margaret Leighton, and her Pamela is expectably perfect. Anthony Quinn brings his subtlest gifts to Caesario, a character in whom anguish and sentiment sprout like city flowers between slabs of concrete. As the Pickett...
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