Word: danners
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...Blythe Danner is an exquisitely accomplished actress, but she is not arrogant enough at the beginning to provide a contrast with her vulnerability at the end. As Tracy's precociously sophisticated preteen sister, Cynthia Nixon captures just the right air of artifice and gives the most assured performance of the evening...
starring Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O'Keefe, Lisa Jane Persky, and Stan Shaw; based on the novel by Pat Conroy; written and directed by Lewis John Carlino...
This is the stuff of classic (not to say old-hat) family drama, and Carlino makes it work primarily by putting Duvall and O'Keefe in front of the camera as father and son and letting them have at each other, with Danner, the long-suffering mother and wife, as occasional reluctant referee. Since all three are tremendous, it comes off beautifully. Duvall, in a full-voiced extension of his Kilgore character in Apocolypse Now, is one of the recent movies' great eccentrics, and O'Keefe foils him by showing more range than an actor his age deserves to have...
...movie's most effective scenes, a confrontation between father and son (Michael O'Keefe) punches home the family's problems. As his wife, Lillian (Blythe Danner), and the rest of the family watches, Metchum reveals the ugliness of his desire, his will, his need to win when the refuses to admit defeat in a game of basketball against his son. After playing dirty in the first place, he taunts his son for being a sissy, a homosexual, and a girl, because the boy will not continue to keep playing until the father wins. Meechum shoves his wife to the ground...
Consistently throughout The Great Santini, in this scene as in others, Duvall, Danner, and O'Keefe save an inferior screenplay with their almost uniformly excellent performances. But bad editing also diminishes the impact their talents have on the film. These problems riddle the scenes between O'Keefe and Stan Shaw, who plays Toomer, a stuttering Black "boy" who, together with his mother, the Meechum's maid, and 14 or so large German shepherd dogs trained to attack white folks, lives in a trailer on the outskirts of the town...