Word: hellman
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Toys in the Attic. Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin try to breathe life into Lillian Hellman's play, but the story about Dixie spinsters who indulge in a bit of brother-smothering is about as believable as Southern-fried matzo balls...
Toys in the Attic. Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin try to breathe life into Lillian Hellman's play, but the story about Dixie spinsters who indulge in a bit of brother-smothering is about as believable as Southern-fried matzo balls...
Toys in the Attic. Lillian Hellman's story about two Southern spinsters and their younger brother is the same tangle of tormented sibling relationships it was on the stage in 1960 and just as lacking in life, though Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller and Dean Martin try valiantly to give it spark...
...this picture, adapted from the drama that in 1960 was selected as Broadway's best, Playwright Hellman returns to the Southern scene of her greatest triumph (The Little Foxes) and to the theme that has attached her deepest energies: the fateful antinomy of power and love. Her leading lady (Geraldine Page) is a gabby genteel old maid, one of those wispy little women who flutter through the literature of the South like a flock of steel butterflies. She lives in a rotting ancestral manse, she graciously permits her spinster sister (Wendy Hiller) to wait on her hand and foot...
...play is written with Hellman's customary vigor and elegance, and James Poe's script incorporates almost all of it intact. What's more, Geraldine Page slithers through her role with the sinister sweetness of a chocolate-covered cobra, and Dean Martin demonstrates impressively that he can act. But something is terribly wrong with this picture. It is cold, mechanical, dead. The central situation is contrived, and the characters are about as sincerely Southern as a bouquet of nylon magnolia blossoms. Playwright Hellman left New Orleans when she was still a child, and time has strewn cobwebs...