Word: gish
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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...
...summer in Maine, August to be exact, and two sisters are spending their summer breathing fresh air and reminiscing about their lives. Their attitudes couldn't be more different. Sarah (played by Gish) happily remembers her past, but she does not live in it. Her sister Libby (Davis), on the other hand, whom age has blinded, is bitter about the tricks life has played on her. She expected her marriage to be like the mating of swans--a lifelong affair--but life fooled her. "She was always a difficult woman, even under the best of circumstances," one character tells Sarah...
...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...