Word: gardens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Nancy Walker are both likable and skillful, and whenever they are permitted to do things instead of being forced to say them-notably in a pantomime of bare-fanged marriage-they are splendid. Lahr in a plane or at a stage door, Walker in a hash house or the Garden of Eden, also have their moments. But too often, though they make their lines brighter, they cannot make them bright. TV's Shelley Berman does nicely in a character-part telephone monologue, but falls flat as a straight man, and the rest of the show alternates dullness and noise...
...Borg (as the Count) was adequate, but Swedish Soprano Elisabeth Soederstroem (as Susanna) was a silvery voiced delight. The sets by Designer Oliver (Rashomon, House of Flowers) Messel were superbly elegant: a boudoir whose rose-colored silk panels and drapes glowed with a kind of faded splendor, a formal garden suffused with the feathery, misty charm of a landscape by Watteau...
Anyway, the air, as somebody remarks, is frightfully aphrodisiacal, and pretty soon the place turns into "a perverted Garden of Eden." Wife No. 1 (Dorothy McGuire) and Husband No. 2 (Richard Egan), who had been lovers in their teens, fall in love again, and one night they slip off to the old boathouse together. Meanwhile, Egan's daughter (Sandra Dee) and McGuire's son (Troy Donahue), both in their teens, wreck a sailboat and spend the night on a deserted beach. When Husband No. 1 (Arthur Kennedy) and Wife No. 2 (Constance Ford) wake up to what...
...translations make much of Homer's epithets (Hera is "white-armed"; Odysseus generally "crafty"). Graves uses them sparingly, and sometimes ironically. The gods are treated with something less than respect; Zeus is a blowhard who hardly ever means what he says, and Hera, his wife, might be a garden-club president. When Zeus, who favors the Trojans, remarks that Hera protects the Greeks as if they were her own bastards, she replies pertly: "Revered Son of Cronus, what a thing to say!" Cartoonist Ronald Searle's illustrations wittily support Graves's wry treatment of the Olympians. Whether...
Brother-in-law's house represents the ultimate in uncomfortable functionalism, with a push-button kitchen, chairs that Hulot can't sit in, and a garden featuring a metallic fish which spouts water (used for company only). Director Tati and his man Hulot take this cheery homestead and turn it into a mechanized madhouse. Hulot, after discovering a rubber-based pitcher that bounces, tried to bounce a glass, only to find that brother-in-law's technicians haven't modernized that item yet. When a modern sofa proves impossible for Hulot to sleep in, he discovers that turned...