Word: joan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Magic. It was perhaps no accident that such a chemical change came when McGovern enlisted the presence of Edward Kennedy. Joined for a time by his wife Joan, Kennedy stumped with McGovern through seven states. He helped to bring out the crowds in validation of a lingering family magic, warmed them up with some of the old self-deprecating one-liners ("It just shows what it is to have a famous brother-in-law"), and then introduced the candidate with a gusto that sometimes left McGovern in an uncomfortable backwash of anticlimax. In Pittsburgh, McGovern was practically bowled over...
Jaimie (Scott Jacoby) is a ten-year-old kid with a chart-shattering IQ who nurtures a selfish affection for his mother and yearns for his deceased father, a TIME editor who had always wanted to write a novel. Jaimie's mother Christine (Joan Hackett) makes quite a nice living, thank you, running a small gallery on Madison Avenue. She and Jaimie are great chums until she meets a whimsical New York tour guide named Peter Simon (Robert Klein). Peter woos her by parking his Volkswagen bus on a wharf and regaling her with tales of his childhood...
...turgid or as invincibly dull as the film that has been fashioned from it. The film makers, making a wild scramble for contemporary relevance, have chosen to frame the story with a singularly absurd yarn about a schizoid evangelist (also portrayed by Miss Ullmann) who believes she is Pope Joan. "Classic case of withdrawal," mutters Psychiatrist Keir Dullea, peering at her through huge spectacles...
...means of flashbacks, Pope Joan correlates the legend with the life of the young evangelist: the nunnery is inter cut with a modern orphanage, Joan's monk father with a back-country Bible thumper, and so on. Invention frequently flags, and there are great barren stretches of the movie that contain no contemporary parallels whatever, presumably because the scenario could invent no 20th century equivalents for the Saxons or the intrigues of the papal court under Leo, who is zestfully portrayed by Trevor Howard...
...Pope Joan is excellently photo graphed by Billy Williams (Women in Love, Sunday Bloody Sunday) and contains a valiant English-speaking debut by Miss Ullmann, who in the films of Ingmar Bergman has established herself as an actress who must be called great. It is a reputation that may not survive many more movies like this...