Word: leightons
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...French play by François Billetdoux, is a wry, tender, amusing, pathetic fable about a wildly incompatible man and woman who come together to pool their emotional losses. Caesario Grimaldi (Anthony Quinn) is an Italian-American contractor, as coarse and gravelly as raw concrete. Pamela Pew-Pickett (Margaret Leighton) is as properly British as the hyphen in her name. When they meet by appointment in a Rockefeller Center restaurant, he sloshes through double Scotches and she sips tea. But he is a wounded animal and she is a shattered teacup. His wife and her doctor-husband are having...
...clock. Now, she can no longer tell time. Jolted out of place and out of time, Caesario and Pamela try to solace each other with sex in the tawdry austerity of a Times Square hotel room. It is a hilarious and heartbreaking scene, and belongs triumphantly to Margaret Leighton. She slugs down one whisky after another, and dances like a puritan posing as a pagan. "This is rather exciting, really," she says in an unlevel voice that slides precariously from jolly-good-sport toward hysteria...
...Miss Leighton, it must be candidly admitted, is a joy to watch at any time, and she almost saves the show just by being in it. Progressively downer and outer, she is ever, as she tells us at the end of Act I when she exits, stoned, with her dress covering little of her back, "every inch a lady...
...everybody. He also has one good line: "I'm free," he announces triumphantly in the second act. "I've got that lousy free feeling." And there's another actor also who should be mentioned. He's Charles Grodin, a young man who plays the hopeless role of Miss Leighton's son--hopeless because the role is one of those zany parts that ordinarily crop up only in the less marketable plays of Blair Brown--and makes it quite memorable...
...this double tchin. Sidney Michaels, its perpetrator, pretends to have "based" his work on a play by Francois Billetdoux (French for Frank Mashnote). Billetdoux did not confuse ambiguity with vagueness and confusion--something Michaels has very conveniently managed to do. The third act, in particular, is a mess. Leighton and Quinn have renounced their money (are completely destitute, in fact), have no place to go and nothing to do (they aren't even married), yet Michaels seems to think he has achieved some sort of brilliantly whimsical happy ending. Or perhaps he's honest enough to realize that the play...