Word: lillian
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Their voices float eerily across more than eight decades, ghostly echoes of a fabled operatic golden age: Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Jean de Reszke, Lillian Nordica and others, recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera by an enterprising music lover armed with an Edison cylinder machine. The sound is strictly low-fi, the scratchy surface noise is sometimes overwhelming, and the tantalizing fragments often break off abruptly with a singer in mid-phrase. But listening to them is thrilling, like hearing Lincoln recite the Gettysburg Address...
...Lillian Hellman will be remembered for her plays The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic. But she seemed to yearn to be remembered for her defiance of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, when it asked her to testify about her Stalinist ties and those of her associates. Throughout her 79 years, especially in the memoirs she wrote during her final two decades, Hellman delighted in presenting herself as tough, combative and above all principled. Many critics, among them former friends, accused her of having a higher regard for her reputation than for the literal truth...
...Lillian, William Luce's one-woman play that opened on Broadway last week, is not about this actual Lillian Hellman. Luce, who celebrated Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, culled Hellman's memoirs to put onstage something approximating the way she saw herself. The result is far from objective history. But it works absorbingly as ribald, poignant entertainment. One of the world's great actresses, Zoe Caldwell, enacts the writer's conversations and confessions in a blend of eerily precise impersonation (down to wearing Tea Rose, Hellman's favorite perfume) and voluble, free-spirited performance...
...narrative frame of Lillian is the day in 1961 when Hellman sat in deathwatch near the bedside of her longtime lover, Novelist Dashiell Hammett. Luce's choice of moment is shrewd. Unlike the sequestered Emily Dickinson, Hellman was one of life's winners, blessed with fame, money, affection and what she seemed to seek most, a measure of power. Her childhood disillusioned her. But whose childhood does not? Her adult life was not marred by more than the normal share of grief. Only the ordeal of Hammett's last illness makes her vulnerable enough for an audience to like, despite...
When film fans dream of old movies, they dream in black and white. They think of Lillian Gish's Scarlet Letter emblazoned in gray. For them the true colors of Red River, Blue Denim, Golden Boy and Green Pastures are those shades of pearl and ivory determined by the films' cinematographers. And when Bogie says, "Here's looking at you, kid," movie lovers gaze at Ingrid Bergman in glorious monochrome...