Word: fonda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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GITTEL LIVES, wired Coe to Director Arthur Penn in Hollywood. Next day Playwright William Gibson was equally convinced. Anne was Gittel for him too. "So how was the Coast?" she greeted him. "Lousy, huh?" The Seesaw team, which had already signed Henry Fonda for the male lead, had found its real star...
...good; dump her.' " But Penn had already recognized something Anne's critics had not: she took direction admirably. "I even had to tell her where the jokes were, but once was enough." On the road Gibson would "write a funny line for Fonda and a question for Annie, and she'd get the laugh and leave Hank standing there with the line in his hand...
Silent Night, Lonely Night (by Robert Anderson) tells of two people in a New England inn on Christmas Eve. Strangers in adjacent rooms-Barbara Bel Geddes has a son in a prep-school infirmary near by, Henry Fonda a wife in a mental sanitarium up the hill-they come together out of loneliness, are at first trivially autobiographical, then more and more confidingly so. They have a drink with newlyweds, look back on marriage that has come to grief, resist pity and show twinges of self-pity, talk of love and resist sex. The woman, it turns...
...author of Tea and Sympathy has written a kind of Elegy in a Country Bedroom, an evening-long unburdening of troubled hearts and sluicing of wistful memories. Much of it is honestly evocative and well expressed. A sensitive Henry Fonda and an appealing Barbara Bel Geddes do well by it. But beyond suffering crucially as a play from all lack of movement, Silent Night suffers equally as a conversation piece from overstretching a mood. That bedeviler of the mood piece, monotony, more and more scatters his poppies. Valid feeling comes more and more to seem watered or sugared...
Miss Bel Geddes and Fonda turn in fairly wooden performances, but there is not much they can do with a script that requires them to mouth such gems as, "God, you're sweet" The minor parts are not badly done, but this is essentially a two-person play. And that includes the audience...