Word: eggs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DEATH OF JOE EGG...
...typically wretched time teaching school. His wife Sheila (Janet Suzman) has tea waiting and dinner warming in the oven. They joke together, Bri tries to coax Sheila into bed, and their only child comes home from school. She is called, with a mixture of brutal humor and despair, Joe Egg. She is autistic, beyond help and hope-a child barely aware of her own life who slumps in her high chair like a boiled vegetable...
Around Joe, Bri and Sheila have constructed an elaborate masquerade. To deal with the pain of her presence, they make jokes about her and about themselves, awful mocking fantasies full of guilt. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg is not about a retarded child, however, but about the dissolution of a marriage. "She's only just alive," Sheila says once about Joe. "But she's the life we've made." That is exactly why Bri tries to destroy...
Originally a play that had a good run in both London and Manhattan, Joe Egg was written by Peter Nichols, himself the father of a spastic child. Boisterous and harrowing, it is a macabre tour de force. But Nichols' adaptation for the screen is stubbornly stagebound, and the young Hungarian director Peter Medak does nothing to liberate it. The film seems forced and artificial, and the bilious lighting makes it look as if it had been staged inside a plastic showcase...
...admits. For that kind of man, no job in the world could offer more: a chance to chase daylight round the world, clambering over hills, slogging through rain forests, stalking through prairie grass in a never-ending hunt for the perfect motel site, Kemmons Wilson's ultimate golden egg...