Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...committees were created by corporations to channel political donations from officers and employees. Common Cause hopes to see Congress cut itself out of the influence game this year by providing tax money for congressional campaigns. Such a move would serve as a farewell present to Common Cause Founder John Gardner, who is retiring as chairman in April. Incumbents have been reluctant to approve such a kitty: Why help challengers? But Congress is about to collect a pay raise and is caught up in an influence-buying scandal with South Korean lobbyists. So pressures to reform Capitol Hill...
Directed by JOHN BERRY Screenplay by HERB GARDNER...
...first act of Thieves an adorable young couple fall to squabbling. In the second act they decide to take it to the divorce courts. In the third act they get back together again. No, the theatrical terminology is not a mistake. Herb Gardner has not so much adapted his Broadway comedy as retyped it in screenplay form. Despite a fair amount of New York City location shooting, the old act breaks are so apparent in the movie that it is as if a curtain had fallen to mark them off. Worse, the dialogue retains its aimed-at-the-balcony archness...
...sent their antique furniture to their first apartment on the Lower East Side, in the neighborhood where they grew up. He is glumly preoccupied with getting and spending, she with gaminish stratagems designed to break through his fagade of indifference. None of these are as amusing as she (or Gardner) thinks they are. A powerful odor of neuroticism - anything but funny - emanates from both parties...
...Gardner, as he showed in A Thousand Clowns, is a writer who comes armed with a little atomizer. It is filled with a blend of heartwarming innocence and sweet-spirited childishness, with which he tries to freshen the air when all this plotting gets too thick. But since his story includes, among other misadventures, a one-night stand for each of his protagonists, an unwanted pregnancy and consequent flirtation with abortion, not to mention such urban delights as an attempted mugging, sudden death in the indifferent streets and a racist cab driver (Irwin Corey, working hard) whom Gardner tries desperately...