Word: gish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BEEN ages since I last saw you," I said to the figures on the screen at the opening moments of The Whales of August. The actors were all familiar, but from bygone eras. The last film I had seen starring Lillian Gish was made before the advent of talking pictures, and Bette Davis's heyday passed long before I was born. Although I had seen Vincent Price regularly as the host of PBS's Mystery, he too had faded from the movie screen...
...with misplaced confidence in his own shrewdness; Chase, for a change, plays a stupid man; Short is pretty much along for the ride, though he has the best actor's moment, choking himself up as he tells some bewildered children about the high point of his life, when Dorothy Gish praised one of his performances. There is a lot of good, broad comedy in Three Amigos!, notably an encounter with a singing bush that knows only public domain songs and Martin's turning an attempt to escape from a dungeon into a parody of a Nautilus workout. Under John Landis...
This is the basic problem with the movie. And perhaps much of the fault lies with Annabeth Gish, who plays Rose. While Gish seems to have much emotion hidden inside her, she never allows any to surface. In real life, this way of acting is fine; on the screen it is boring. Gish seems to be a duckling on the verge of turning into a swan, but she never metamorphoses. Like the movie, she stays a duckling the entire way through...
...While Gish's lackluster performance is disappointing, at least it provides a backdrop for those of her parents. Williams and Voight pick up where Gish left off and go one step further. Along with Star, they provide the film with what interest it has. In fact, one ends up wishing the movie would spend less time with Rose and more on her much more fascinating and complex parents, who are each grappling with somewhat more real problems...
...actress whose plainness of manner amounts to a kind of self-cancellation, is dully conventional. And a subplot that involves them in an endlessly unfunny attempt to soothe the troubled spirit of Burgess's mad old mom is irrelevant and near to tasteless. She is played by Lillian Gish, and the movies' oldest pro clearly understands that she is trapped in Sweet Liberty's dreariest neighborhood. She does her brash best to break loose, but her efforts are more brave than successful. Doubtless her first auteur, D.W. Griffith, warned her there would be roles like this. And movies like this...