Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novels, a small, approachable comedy of manners, widely regarded among Jamesian scholars as the masterpiece of his early years. But the story of Eugenia and Felix, Europeanized sister and brother who return to Massachusetts for some genteel fortune hunting, is, on the face of it, unlikely material for a film in the Age of Travolta...
...piece has a good, basic comic premise in the puzzled response of the black-clad, soberly Unitarian locals to the exotic birds of passage who have come to light among them. This is nicely realized in the film by Felix, an unpretentiously bohemian artist, recognizing in his cousin Gertrude a fellow spirit struggling to burst free. The couple, played with lively grace by Tim Woodward and Lisa Eichhorn, provide the movie with its most beguiling passages, and their story, his winning her away from the lumpish minister her family intends her to marry, gives it its strong est narrative pulse...
About Eugenia's pursuit of the well-to-do Robert Acton - what should be the film's central action - one's feelings are ambiguous. James himself never quite pinned down what instinct preserved Acton and his fortune from her designs. The movie is even less clear on that point, perhaps because Lee Remick, as Eugenia, does not touch on those hints of boldness and desperation that are implicit in the text. Robin Ellis might have brought to Acton more of the shrewdness and tart ness of his Poldark. As presented, the pair are so agreeable and handsome...
Ivory might have been helpful, but he is a careful and slightly anemic director, unable to dig out tensions lurking beneath his correct, bland surfaces. The result is a pleasant, pretty entertainment. One suspects that this film is outside its natural element on a theatrical screen, that its mod est virtues would shine to better advantage on PBS. If we had a properly functioning public broadcasting system in the country, American classics like The Europeans might be produced with funds and talent in profusion...
...interminable years in bedrooms, board rooms, massage parlors, even on a free-love farm, researching the changing sexual mores of middle-class America. The conclusions are so enticing that the book, with the publication date still six months away, already has earned nearly $4 million, including a $2.5 million film-rights agreement last week. Now that the sex epic has climaxed, Talese wants to write about the sociology of baseball. "I'm a baseball addict," he confesses. "More of a sports fan than a sex fan." To be called Thy Wife's Lament, perhaps...