Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Garden, Keep It in the Family, and Song of the Grasshopper, three turkeys that trotted to their dooms. Appropriately enough, Garden was about mercy killing of a sort. Dr. Cook has kept God's bucolic little acre of Greenfield Center, Vt., weeded by systematically poisoning mentally retarded children and town skinflints who fight bills for new schools. Burl Ives as the doctor made a sly sweet monster, but he wasn't really scary. What was really scary about the Ira Levin melodrama was that someone produced...
Keep It in the Family might have been called Bringing Down Father. Father is a tyrannical martinet who stamps on the egos of his wife and children as if they were vermin. The eeriest sight of the evening was watching Patrick Magee's performance as the domineering parent: apparently no one told him that he was no longer playing the mad marquis in last season's Marat Sade...
...darkened bedroom lies Mother, mortally ill, the heart and guiding hand of seven boys and girls ranging in age from three to 16. The film begins at "Mothertime," the family's daily sunset gathering around her big brass bed for Bible reading and counseling. As the children arrive, Mother dies...
Into this precarious and primitive world bursts Charlie Hook (Dirk Bogarde), Mother's former husband and therefore the children's putative parent. Charlie is the classic cad; he gulls the kids with razzle-dazzle and big talk, swindles them out of their savings, and fills their mother's house with booze and popsies. The climax comes when Charlie puts the house up for sale, profanes their devotions, and triumphantly vilifies mother...
...keeps his camera close to his subjects, frequently narrowing the field of vision to a telling detail-a hand on a sleeve, a pouring pitcher, a pair of eyes-again and again creating the effect of a sequence of stunning stills that build and sustain the mood. The children, though, are Clayton's triumph. Each of them is such an accomplished scene stealer that it is hard to tell whether the director deserves more credit for evoking acting ability in his brood or for keeping it under control...