Word: goforth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Elizabeth plays Flora Goforth, a decaying harridan who has made herself one of the richest women in the world by marrying six husbands-"a pyramid of tycoons." She is spending the summer on her private Mediterranean is land, in a flashy white villa guarded by a sinister dwarf (Michael Dunn) and his killer dogs. When she is not screaming at her servants or bullying her pretty secretary (Joanna Shimkus), Flora is rasping out her gamy memoirs into a complex of microphones and tape recorders scattered throughout the house...
...jewels, incidentally, were genuine: about $2,000,000 worth used in the course of the picture-most of them came from Bulgari in Rome. Genuine, too, was the Goforth villa, built for the occasion in Sardinia and fitted out with a real monkey, a real myna bird and real sitar-strumming Indians. But not real acting. And certainly not much real camp. About the only amusing scene in the film is the entrance of Noel Coward, a minor character known as the Witch of Capri, clad in a brown dinner jacket and riding pig-a-back on a servant...
...token of "the huge success of The Taming of the Shrew, of which we have a very large percentage," said Burton. And no worry about the family coffers being depleted. The Burtons are tucking another $2,000,000 under the mattress in Sardinia, where they are making Goforth, the hopeful new tide of Tennessee Williams' two-time Broadway flop, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore...
...brought to the same theme. Julian meets Miss Alice (Irene Worth) and at the end of Act II is seduced by her. The seduction scene owes a discernible if unintentional debt to Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More. In that play, Mrs. Goforth, also an enormously wealthy woman, nakedly tempted a poet-saint in her offstage boudoir. From stage center, Miss Alice tempts the lay-brother saint. With her bare-shouldered back to the audience, she whips open her black negligee and nakedly faces Julian. As he drops to his knees before...
...play is still a religious allegory centered on "the need to find someone or something that means God to you." But the character of Flora Goforth, the rich, raffish ex-Follies girl dying in her Italian mountaintop villa, has lost fire. When Hermione Baddeley played Flora, the dark power of death was as chilling as her nighttime screams. The second Mrs. Goforth, Tallulah Bankhead, seems to regard death as part of the servant problem, a petty retainer whom she can sack with a throaty rumble of brandy-voiced regality. Perhaps actressing is a better word for her performance than acting...