Word: isadora
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...Isadora drank too much, she couldn't keep her hands off good-looking young men, couldn't bother to keep her figure in shape, never could keep track of her money. But a great sense of health filled the hall when the pearshaped figure with the beautiful great arms tramped forward slowly from the back of the stage, She was afraid of nothing; she was a great dancer...
...youth was fin de siècle; her philosophy was fin du monde. She was an earthly personification of Emily Dickinson's inebriate of air and debauchee of dew, stoned on life and art. In answer to the question, "What gods has mankind worshipped?" Dancer Isadora Duncan once replied: "Dionysus - yesterday. Christ - today. After tomorrow, Bacchus at last!" In short she was the quintessential bohemian, the ideal subject for a screen biography. The Loves of Isadora supplies the ideal object: Vanessa Redgrave, whose enactment of Duncan carries with it an exquisite sensitivity and a formidable intelligence...
That intelligence can seldom shine through the film. Director Karel Reisz (Morgan!) has found an appropriately Proustian mode in which to tell the story, pouring time forward and then reversing it, like the sand in an hour glass. But he places Isadora, the first natural dancer, on a background of numbing artificiality and casts her opposite a series of unconvincing poseurs and popinjays. The baroque scenario -radically cut from 170 to 131 minutes -is florid without being literate, essentially true to the events, but essentially false to the tragicomic character who made them happen...
Lights and crowds were the scene as Vanessa Redgrave hit Hollywood for the premiere of Isadora, playing a two-week stand to qualify it for the 1968 Academy Awards...
...caped white dress with a jeweled belt before it hit the runway. In five days the store sold copies of more than 400 dresses ($90 to $175) and 300 coats ($160 to $495), plus hundreds of shoes and berets. Favorite accessory: a six-foot-long floating Isadora Duncan sea of bias silk twill. One item too special for mass reproduction: Valentino's hand-painted stockings, which sell Rome for $50 a pair. Reason, said Lord & Taylor, is that they are too fragile and too perishable...