Word: farmers
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Great beauties of the 1930s must have dreamed of looking like Frances Farmer. Right arms all over Hollywood would be deposited in the gene bank if it returned eyes as crystal blue as hers, features and figures as smart and sensuous. Add a dusky voice and no little acting potential, and you have God's recipe for a movie star. But if Farmer was a blessed presence in Samuel Goldwyn's Come and Get It and a dozen B pictures, her life was one roiling curse. She was part of a movie age that glorified the strong-willed...
...courtroom and taunts the judge with sarcasm. Then she realizes the consequences, asks to make a phone call and is dragged away screaming. Lange goes through the scene ten times-teasing, glaring, hating, crying, shrieking, allowing the camera to read the subtlest nuances on a face that remarkably resembles Farmer's. Graeme Clifford, Lange's editor on The Postman Always Rings Twice and her director on Frances, shouts "Cut! Print!" Lange goes limp; she has reason to feel exhausted, and pleased...
...before Lange's debut in the Dino de Laurentiis King Kong, that she read Farmer's autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning? In vain she tried to persuade Bob Rafelson or Bob Fosse to direct it. (Rafelson would hire Lange for The Postman; Fosse is now preparing a film based on the tragic life of a modern starlet, Dorothy Straiten, with Mariel Hemingway in the lead.) In the interim came Shadowland, William Arnold's incorrigibly readable Farmer biography. The Frances screenwriters claim their script is based on original research, so Arnold has sued and awaits...
...Farmer didn't have to go to Hollywood for that. She had a character assassin right at home: her own mommie dear est, Lillian. Six feet tall and fearsome as a Pauline Bunyan, Lillian made headlines in World War I when she crossbred a Rhode Island Red, a White Leghorn and an Andalusian Blue to produce a red-white-and-blue chicken-the Bird Americana-as she called it, which she proposed as the new national emblem. By the time of the next World War, Lillian was convinced that the Communists had driven her poor daughter crazy...
...part of Frances' fictionalized friend Harry York is taken by another part-time movie star, Playwright Sam Shepard, who "picked this movie because it's like a Greek tragedy." But one with a happy ending. Now the stardom that Frances Farmer never quite achieved in her prime is likely to be hers a dozen years after her death...