Word: delancey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Crossing Delancey...
What's a gal to do? Take what she can get, work hard and hope. The three new, earnest, off-Hollywood movies from this star-worthy trio -- Irving's Crossing Delancey, Arquette's The Big Blue and Winger's Betrayed -- suggest that when a project has doom scrawled across it, even an incandescent actress can't save the day. If her luck breaks even, maybe she can save herself...
There is no salvation for Irving in Director Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey. The star, playing a Manhattan bookstore manager named Isabelle Grossman, is made to look tired and behave with moral myopia. Can't Isabelle see that the European author (Jeroen Krabbe) who courts her is just one more serpent-eyed wordsmith who would flatter a pretty woman's intellect to soften her resolve? Can't she tell that sweet-souled Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), a pickle salesman from the old neighborhood, is the guy for her? Isabelle's Yiddishe grandma (Reizl Bozyk) can tell, in cliches that...
Susan Sandler's script takes this same Old World view of urban feminism. Isabelle would be emotionally independent, but the movie knows better: she needs a man. Forced to choose between man the European snake and man the American sofa, Isabelle chooses domestic comfort. Crossing Delancey takes Sam's cozy tone too, when it should be screaming its way into black satire. If that's all there is for a modern woman -- or for an actress of Irving's sorceress smarts -- then she might as well curl up in bed with Henry James or Henry Miller and turn...
...Lower East Side of New York City, the subway still stops at Delancey Street. The name conjures history, evoking the early decades of the century, when waves of women arrived from Lithuania, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia. For them, the New World turned out to be the cold-water tenements, sweatshops and street stalls near the station. The photographs of those women -- staggering under bundles of piecework balanced on their heads, bent over sewing machines, huddled with their children in the dank rooms where entire families worked, slept, ate and died -- have become images for the way many Americans think about...