Word: maddow
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...Affair of the Skin just misses being a first-class parody of the foreign art films that inspired it. Purporting to show "the realism of grownup, contemporary sex" in America-not in England or France or Italy-Producer-Writer-Director Ben Maddow (The Savage Eye) serves up a mannered little pastiche of urban infidelities that is pure counterfeit. Husband Kevin McCarthy can't stand shrewish Wife Lee Grant, so he takes up with Model Viveca Lindfors, who is the mistress of his best friend Herbert Berghof. Rounding out the quintet, for no discernible reason except to exploit interracial dalliance...
Genet's Balcony is now a movie. Aficianadoes of the author will be horrified at the amount of revision Ben Maddow applied to the play; others, like the good old Boston moralists among them, may just be horrified. The great majority of viewers, however, will probably be simply bored...
...film possesses many virtues that the stage Balcony lacked. There is a consistent if somewhat incoherent plot line, and good riot scenes expertly spliced from newsreels dispell, to a degree, the static quality that results from Genet's weak talkiness. The playwright treated his characters as speaking symbols; Maddow converted them into more three-dimensional figures...
...earlier scenes, however, the low jinks are vigorous and apropos. Genet has a gruesomely pictorial sense of humor ("Is the archbishop dead?"-"I hope so. His head is tied to the handlebars of a little boy's bicycle") and Scenarist Ben Maddow has a cute wit of his own ("The world is full of whores, but a good bookkeeper is hard to find"). Too often, unhappily, the film is cute where the play was poetic, too often Director Joseph Strick permits his performers to natter what they are intended to intone. But moments of lurid lyricism survive, and vestiges...
...committed horrible crimes," he confesses before he goes, "but the worst crime of all is me." Possibly, but next to Actor Harvey-who acts with the strutting, stagy bravura of Early Barrymore -come the screenwriter (Ben Maddow), the director (Charles Walters), and the author's agent who made the deal in the first place...