Word: farmers
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...Best Actress nominations are two more divine masochists in dour year-end movies. Meryl Streep incarnates a tragic Polish heroine in an adaptation of William Styron's bestselling novel Sophie's Choice, and Jessica Lange slips under the fair, glistening skin of '30s Movie Star Frances Farmer in Frances...
...melodrama in Frances Farmer's life was real; her tragedy was that she never got to play it onscreen. From the moment she hit Hollywood in 1935, barely 22 and with a natural blond beauty, Farmer determined to play by her own rules. She would adorn no mogul's casting couch, coddle no gossip columnist. She deserted Hollywood after her first hit movie (Come and Get It, 1936) to join the Group Theater in New York City as the star of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy. Life struck back at Frances with gaudy vengefulness. Odets and his group...
...Farmer has become a small industry of late-this movie, a TV biography, three off-Broadway plays and three books-but no one has been able to turn those fascinating snippets of degradation into a coherent story line. Even the can't-miss sequences (rape and lobotomy) fall flat; they don't raise hackles or sympathies. Kim Stanley has little to do as Frances' eccentric mother, and Sam Shepard is saddled with the preposterous role of Frances' mysterious friend who keeps popping up all over the West Coast whenever she needs consolation. This gifted actor-playwright...
...decline of the Western world. But as a short-story writer, she achieved the violent grace of a folk ballad. Something atavistic, something frontier-Texan came out in her. The sentences cut, like the wife's knife stabbing her husband's lover in "Maria Concepcion," like the farmer's ax splitting the head of his tormentor in "Noon Wine...
...they speak more readily of Armageddon than of dinner. Yet the best of them can see the tragedy of the blacks as the reverse image of their own history, and acknowledge the need for justice. Their dilemma may be insoluble, but whatever answer the future will provide, as one farmer puts it, is "waiting in the shadows." Barbara Villet's unique and grieving work illuminates those shadows sufficiently to prompt sympathy, and to engender hope...