Word: deaf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Linda Manz. "I didn't have to act. I just did it. I was brought up scared, so I act scared." Linda Manz, a street-corner scuffler with old eyes, whose half-deaf mother worked as a cleaning woman in Manhattan, tells about her first film role as Richard Gere's kid sister in Days of Heaven. "Ursula was the name of the character at first, but they changed it to Linda, 'cause it was me. It ain't no girl in the 1900s." The film is a strange, dreamlike reminiscence of days when migrant harvesters followed steam-driven threshing...
WITH MANHATTAN, the media tell us, Allen enters a new phase of his career--intertwining the consummation of his humor in Annie Hall with the depth and seriousness of Interiors. If so, the Interiors strand nearly strangles Manhattan. Why are so many critics deaf to the poverty of the language in Interiors and parts of Manhattan? The direct study of personality in a society of encounter sessions and "meaningful relationships" threatens to scour all metaphors and imagery from both critics and artists...
...Tommy. This is the work that turns the crime of passion into an art form. This is the story of a young boy's lapse into a blind, deaf and dumb state, induced by witnessing his father's murder. This is the story of a boy who suffers repeated assault to emerge as pinball champion, guru, and finally, a victim of his own followers' violence. This is the show that almost appeared in Dudley House. However, a Master's wrath (piqued by an oversize stage) forced a sudden relocation to the Currier fishbowl...
Similarly, the special effects, designed by Richard Green, seem promising, but ultimately become distractions and reduce the impact of some find performances. A film of abstract shapes, depicting the thoughts of the deaf, dumb, and blind Tommy ends up frying your eyeballs while conveying no impression of mental activity by any actor on stage at the time. The electronic music heralding Tommy's return to awareness competes with a band more than capable of communicating the power of the moment...
...while, it was hard to figure out where the cast of Tommy left their show. As we go to press, the place seems to be Currier House, where the show originated. The production, based on the opera by Peter Townsend of The Who, is about a youth who goes deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing his mother's infidelity; eventually he finds his callin as a pinball player extrordinaire. It's all laden with heavy Christ symbolism...