Word: gielguds
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...aging literary gents are discovered at wordplay in a womblike Edwardian salon. John Gielgud, the social-climbing guest, is a failed poet and garrulous pub bore. Host Ralph Richardson is a successful but dipsomaniacal belletrist blimp who keeps two menacing servants to guard against just such intrusions. Together these two titled mandarins of the stage are guiding us into Pinter-land, where words struggle to contain the open-ended flux of existence. Our journey through it is brilliantly illuminated by their partnership...
Prufrocks in Reverse. Using ordinary language and sometimes vulgar mannerisms, the two Prufrocks reverse their accustomed stage personae to hint at tenuous meanings as complex as any in Eliot's poetry. Gielgud, a seedy intellectual in beer-stained pinstripes, conceals his natural grace and authority under nervous movements-hitching up his pants, ruffling his sandy-haired wig, filching cigarettes. He babbles an obbligato of literary cliches in an excessively ingratiating attempt to establish human contact. Richardson's stock character, the failed dreamer, prefers to stay pick led in his past: his arm now is to "drink with dignity...
...revolve around them. Topol, who last loped in Fiddler on the Roof, has a sort of toothy ingenuousness that gives Galileo an unfortunate puppy-dog quality. Topol misses the role's strength, both in character and intellect. Most of the actors around him, however, are superb: John Gielgud, Margaret Leighton, Edward Fox, Patrick Magee, John McEnery...
...Lumet. The disclosure scene is bungled by being to flatly spelled-out; the flashbacks are too insistent, show too much. Everything is reduced to a simple formula; each murderer gets his motive neatly assigned to him. The energy is lost that should be generated in any room containing John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman et al. Lumet doesn't seem to realize that such energy won't generate itself, that he has to do something to make it happen. The pace of his film is slow, so slow at the beginning that you can enjoy it purely as an atmosphere...
Private Lives is the highest level of British fluff, written by Noel Coward, directed by John Gielgud, starring Maggie Smith and John Standing. A custardy respite from reading period. At the Shubert Theater through Saturday night only...