Word: gilliatt
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...film's actors pleased and impressed its author as complementary to her characters. She imagined Daniel, the middle-aged Jewish doctor, exactly as Peter Finch plays him. Of Glenda Jackson, in the part of Alex, the woman divorcee, Gilliatt says: "Glenda is a brilliant actress with much in common with Alex intellectually, but not much temperamentally. She's got that great horsepower as an actress." Murray Head, who plays the young sculptor whom both Daniel and Alex love, manages to catch, in the sweet vacancy of his expression on screen, the "ariel quality of some free agent...
...Gilliatt never intended Alex to be the neurotic some film critics have supposed. She sees...
...Jarrow hunger marches in 1906 are built deep into the nation's memory, and into the background of her characters. Class differentiation in the film as seen, to be gradually disintegrating. Bob represents a classless agent, although his implicit working-class origin has strong reverberations for the English. Somewhere, Gilliatt says, "Bob has a dad who didn't want him to go down into the mines, who wanted much more for his son than he had for himself...
...while Schlesinger and Gilliatt puzzled over how to portray Bob and Daniel's affection. Rather than being recondite, they finally decided to film it as simply as possible. Just as two friends would shake hands upon meeting, so the two are shown greeting each other with a kiss. Gilliatt is aware of the aesthetic difficulty of filming sex. "Fucking is obviously what you feel not what you see, and nameless backs fucking and hands clenched when a person is coming" are techniques Gilliatt feels cheapen and confuse "a liberty the director has, which he might as well use properly...
...Gilliatt astonishes with the number of projects she juggles. Viking press will publish in the summer of '72 her two new books--one on film and theater, and the other a collection of short stories. She edits and is part owner of an English journal of political opinion. This spring a London theater will run a series of short plays she has written. She will then return in four months to write the New Yorker magazine's film criticism. Somehow she has found the energy to consider writing another movie script, and admits she would love to try herself...