Word: glenda
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...only the latest in a long line of actresses savaged by Simon. He has described Maureen Stapleton as inhabiting "a large, amorphous body out of which protrude flipperlike limbs and a face without a single redeeming feature." To Simon, Maggie Smith resembles "an upstart rooster aspiring to barnyard supremacy." Glenda Jackson "has the looks of an asexual harlequin." Most leading ladies suffer Simon silently, but after he characterized Sylvia Miles as a "party girl and gate crasher," she dumped a plate of food on him in a Manhattan restaurant...
...zipper. "Was it too much for you?" Oliver Reed asks Alan Bates after they finish a wrestling match in the raw, the homosexual hints dripping off their bodies faster than swear. Then the line pops up again, this time after Reed has been rollicking in the snow with Glenda Jackson: "Was it too much for you," he asks her, as the irony subtly smashes our way. This is too much, period...
...THIS UNSCATHING satire, Glenda Jackson is running for abbess of the convent against Felicity (Susan Penhaligon), a young nun who preaches a platform of free love. With the help of her Haldeman-Ehrlichman like cronies (Geraldine Page and Anne Jackson), Jackson engineers a scheme to record her rival's conversations and steal love letters from her sewing basket. Naturally, the Jesuits hired to filch the evidence are caught in the act, and the nuns decide on cover-up rather than confession...
...Glenda Jackson, who is running for abbess, consolidates her strength with the help of two Haldeman-Ehrlichman types (Geraldine Page, Anne Jackson) and enough bugs and hidden cameras to outfit Moscow's embassy row. Her young rival (Susan Penhaligon), who is having a tumble under the poplars with a neighborhood priest, campaigns on a promise to make the abbey into a love nest. Just before Jackson sweeps to victory, her forces send a pair of Jesuit novices to burglarize her rival's sewing basket in search of love letters...
...Glenda Jackson holds her sometimes blatant screen presence in check and plays her devious role just right -that is, absolutely straight. Her haughty deadpan shades imperceptibly into sanctity or into sanctimony as her plotting requires. Sandy Dennis has some moments of dimwit charm as a John Dean-like scapegoat who has none of Dean's shrewdness, or anybody else's either. But a running gag in which a globetrotting diplomatic nun (Melina Mercouri) periodically uses her briefcase radio-phone to coach Jackson in Kissingeresque Realpolitik falls rather flat. And the Gerald Ford figure is a football-playing...