Word: flora
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...beginning, Cassidy is a simple revolutionary, spitting at the carriage trade while he digs ditches to support his mother (Flora Robson) and sister (Sian Phillips), both doomed to die in genteel poverty. The teakettle warmth of Irish family life simmers comfortably until Director Jack Cardiff plunges into the eye of street fights during the Transport Strike and the bloody Easter Rising of 1916, catching the awful impact of thudding billy clubs, of bullets and bombs and sudden death, letting his camera soak up the slaughter in pitiless detail...
...Slight Ache lasts longer but makes its point quicker and clearer. Edward and Flora, a husband and wife, are enjoying a sunlit view of their country-house garden. He (Henderson Forsythe) is a scholar of distant cultures. She (Frances Sternhagen) is a busy suburban bee. Edward is obsessively irked by a human blight just beyond the garden, an aged, decrepit match-seller who haunts the forsaken site from dawn to dusk with no prospect of selling matches. Edward invites the old man into the house to have it out with him. The matchseller looks like a cross between a Skid...
...Flora, the matchseller reflects her desires and the need to love and cherish a man. Husband and bum reverse roles, and at play's end, Flora puts the matchseller's tray between Edward's nerveless fingers and grasps the old man's hand in hers...
Batasi is best when it doesn't take its enlightened spirit too seriously. Sexy U.N. Secretary Mia Farrow (daughter of Maureen O'Sullivan, Tarzan's favorite lane in the Africa that was) turns the coup into a coo with John Leyton, a stranded British private. Flora Robson adds snap as a visiting lady M.P., but the pick of the lot is Richard Attenborough. As a starched and polished relic of the Kipling era, hopelessly out of keeping with the age of Kenyatta, Attenborough turns a cliché into a memorable character sketch-etched most sharply when...
...opening scene is a country house where Edward, an essayist, and Flora, his wife, are having breakfast. After desultory chatter about flowers and a duel with a wasp, their attention turns to an old matchseller standing by the back gate. The man disturbs Edward, but Flora finds him faintly attractive. Both are alternately fascinated and repelled by him. Edward interrogates him, insults him, soliloquizes on youthful glories now defunct. Flora too interviews him, trying to find out why she feels drawn to him. Gradually it becomes evident that the couple knows the old man intimately, either in memory...