Word: hoffa
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...film cobbles together its story line from every half-baked rumor that ever surfaced about the famous pair. Bobby and Marilyn had a torrid affair, we learn, that was witnessed almost every step of the way by surveillance men hired by Jimmy Hoffa. The Teamsters boss even orders Bobby killed, but the would-be assassin, after training his telescopic sight on the couple smooching in a park, chickens out. Good thing, since Mafia boss Sam Giancana shortly thereafter tells Hoffa to lay off because the Mob is "doing a little business" with the Kennedy brothers...
...Hoffa isn't the only one monitoring the affair. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (whose phone is answered in the middle of the night by the fellow sharing his bed) blackmails Bobby with damaging photos. That forces Kennedy to break off the affair, which leaves Marilyn so distraught that she takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. The suicide scene is the film's lunatic climax: so many people scurry in and out of Marilyn's house as the actress lies dying (among them Peter Lawford, Bobby himself and an ambulance team that rushes her to the hospital and then...
...question, right up there with who shot J.R., what's in Al Capone's vault, and where's Jimmy Hoffa...
...Heart). But she has learned little from any of them about building comedy or character. Though this off-Broadway production, handsomely designed by Loren Sherman, boasts two movie-marquee names -- bossy Marcia Gay Harden, frazzled Julie Hagerty -- it is Frank Whaley (the kid at the diner in Hoffa) who carries the burden of the play and almost makes it soar. He masks an artist's passion in beguiling nonchalance...
CRITICS GROUSE ABOUT HOLLYWOOD'S LOVE OF THE tried and true, but ultimately that's just what the audience wants. Proof: this holiday season's movie- attendance figures. The big disappointments were all thematically adventurous: Leap of Faith (Steve Martin as an evangelist), Hoffa (Jack Nicholson as a labor leader), Malcolm X (Denzel Washington as a civil rights activist) and Toys (Robin Williams as . . . whatever...