Word: heckart
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GUNSMOKE (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Eileen Heckart plays a frontier schoolteacher held prisoner by a bunch of hillbilly cutthroats...
BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE. No one expects a new comic writer to be another Neil Simon or Jean Kerr. But one does expect him to be funny and to be himself. Leonard Gershe is only sporadically funny and never uniquely himself. Eileen Heckart, playing the mother of a blind young man who seeks independence by moving into his own apartment, can groan and pun-like a baritone sax-and delivers her lines almost as if Gershe had delivered the goods...
...made a brave gesture of self-sufficiency by setting up in his own East Village apartment. The girl (Blythe Danner) lives in the adjoining flat. They meet and bedmate, only to have the boy's Mom arrive unexpectedly, as Moms expectably do in plays like this. Mom (Eileen Heckart) inspects the setup like a staff officer suddenly assigned to a colonial outpost full of weird natives and primitive sanitary facilities...
...Heckart can growl and purr like a baritone sax, and she delivers her lines as if the playwright had delivered the goods. He has not. Gershe is only sporadically funny and never uniquely himself, but simply a one-man situation and gag file...
Although murder and mental illness are hardly laughing matters. Director Jack Smight squeezes legitimate comedy from the corrosive camaraderie of Steiger and Segal in their hare-and-hound relationship. Not that the film is totally successful. Eileen Heckart, as Segal's mom, aims at Kosher salami but comes out Irish ham. And the end, heavy with Christian expiation, is as self-conscious as a Sunday-school morality play...