Word: irma
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...years old, and it is hard to believe that he was about half that age when MGM in 1948 assigned him to compose, score and direct the music for a $3,000,000 Jeanette MacDonald movie. Since then, he has plucked four Oscars for scoring Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Irma La Douce and My Fair Lady. Now Previn is changing, and so is his career. "The boy-wonder thing is over," he mused last week. "I have decided to concentrate on conducting to the exclusion of the Hollywood thing...
Directors, actors and playwrights are cross-pollinating all over the theatrical garden. Peter Brook directed Flower Drum Song, The Visit, Irma La Douce and King Lear (with Paul Scofield) in New York, and he has designed productions for Co vent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera. For the movies, he directed Olivier in Beggar's Opera, Belmondo and Moreau in Moderate Cantabile, and Lord of the Flies. The controversial Marat/Sade is also his. Robert Bolt, who wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and who wrote the play A Man for All Seasons, is now cranking...
...companions towering over him and his neck straining to keep up with the conversation. A cocktail table unobtrusively revolves, mixing up drinks and drinkers. A "dead body" glares from an open coffin. In the gilded-cage elevator, a monster rattles and bangs the bars. And then there is Irma...
...legend goes that Irma has haunted the house since its days as a residence, unable to rest because of guilt feelings about some piano lessons she never took proper advantage of. So, invisibly, she takes her place each night and bangs out tunes. The bartender often places a glass of spirits with a straw near the keyboard; it is soon drained. Irma plays a little less surely after that. But she always tries to answer requests, except for songs written after 1932. She died then. Skeptics claim that the music is played by a hidden, live pianist on a keyboard...
...predecessors, contains symbols and images which are woven throughout the film. Many sequences are meant as parodies of classic scenes from other movies. The dream sequence from "8 1/2" where the hero is confronted by all his former women finds very fitting application here. The poolroom fight from Irma La Douce is transferred to a library where it unfortunately becomes less effective. Best of all, there is a classic Keystone Cops parody using go-carts instead of jalopies. These parodies permit the script to jump out of reality without invoking our disbelief...