Word: chambermaid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...film, in which director Jean (A Certain Smile) Negulesco has tried to turn Nancy Mitford's nit-witty high-society farce (TIME, Oct. 15, 1951) into a conventional comedy, develops into a fairly funny, mildly sophisticated what-is-it, rather like an interpolation of The Diary of a Chambermaid with the last six books of the Odyssey...
This year's Hasty Pudding show is a mass of incongruities: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, thinly disguised, hob-nob with a Marxist chambermaid; an Irish plumber appears in the midst of the expatriate rich on the isle of Elba; a sexy French singer takes a copy of Dr. Zhivago into the shower with her. Yet somehow all these strained touches combine to make an evening...
...Squaw Valley Lodge on Thanksgiving Day, 1949, was a memorable fiasco. Cushing had to hire strikebreakers when his union workmen struck the week of the opening, hooked up plumbing himself. Justine hurriedly summoned the domestic couple from their New York home, pressed a friend into service as a chambermaid. One woman guest arrived early, found Cushing still at work on the plumbing. Snarled Alec: "Madam, come back in three hours, and we'll be ready. Meanwhile, don't bother me." That night everything went wrong. There was no dinner until 10. Only one toilet was working...
Anthony next meets Christine in a bar, 18 years later; he has "lowered myself, as by a rope" into squalor--the cobwebs and cracked plaster of bohemia, to find "reality." He is betrothed by a mixture of lust, masochism, and jealousy, to a teen-age chambermaid who occupies as many beds as she makes...
There is a little action, a climactic scene, Anthony's self-realization ("by means of self-betrayals," notes Guerard on the jacket cover), and his whipped-dog return to the chambermaid...