Word: fonda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There has been quite a conglomeration of talent at the Colonial for the past two weeks. Robert Anderson, author of Tea and Sympathy, has written a play called Silent Night, Lonely Night, in which two accomplished professionals, Henry Fonda and Barbara Bel Geddes, star. Peter Glenville has turned his considerable talents toward directing this production, and Jo Mielziner and Theoni V. Aldredge handle lighting and costuming...
...play is deceptively advertised as the story of two lonely strangers who meet in a New England town on Christmas Eve. Well, Katherine, acted by Miss Bel Geddes, is lonely, but she has a husband in London. And John, played by Fonda, has a wife in the local sanitarium...
...Manhattan movie theater, a woman in the roped-off guest section raised her voice in the dark to cry: "Good heavens, how could Hank have accepted such a role?" There on the screen, prancing awkwardly in mandarin robes, flamenco suits, a clown costume, a silly goatee, was Henry Fonda in the role of Willie Bauché, Hollywood producer-director-writer-actor and the most elaborate phony since the big bad wolf...
Another question is in order. How could a smoothly expert screenwriter like Nunnally Johnson (The Desert Fox, The Three Faces of Eve) have wrung so much carbonated pap out of a skillfully written Romain Gary novel? "Marriage is the last frontier," says Fonda. "Few men face it without remembering what happened to Dr. Livingstone." With that he proposes to an aspiring star (Leslie Caron), whose name he soon writes in the Hollywood sky. They marry, but he is too busy merchandising his wife's soul to give husbandly attention to her body; as their marriage nears its third...
Fighting back, Fonda hires assassins, one of whom kills the other. He also fends off a blackmailer who wants enough money to live for three days like an American tourist. Thus the film alternates between unsuccessful farce and success-formula soap opera, but it never quite lives up to its pressagentry as "twists of tender pathos sublimated by laughter before the pathos can descend to bathos." The Man Who Understood Women is bathos cubed...