Word: melvyn
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Tell Me a Riddle is the story of David and Eva (Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova)--two contrasting personalities living alone together. Their kids are married off and their house feels large. David, retired union organizer, is outgoing and affable. Eva, on the other hand, is introverted--slightly deaf, she is able to turn off the world by turning off her hearing aid. But she cannot extinguish a constant stream of disturbing flashbacks that remind her of years spent in Nazi concentration camps. Together, the husband and wife quarrel about selling the house. He sees it as a pragmatic move...
...Kedrova, the old woman mostly seems merely gaga. It is sometimes hard to determine whether her grimaces are meant to convey joy or pain or simply the frustration of an actress trying to find a part that no one quite bothered to write out for her. The doughty trouper Melvyn Douglas, playing her husband, seems similarly afflicted. Both performers are the victims of Lee Grant's direction, which is diffident and lacks both élan and a clear viewpoint...
...named Richard Nixon; of cancer; in Manhattan. The election battle, in which Nixon's attacks on his liberal opponent for being "soft on Communism" first earned him the epithet "Tricky Dick," ended Douglas' political career. She rarely spoke about her onetime foe afterward, but her husband, Actor Melvyn Douglas, was less reticent: "A little, sneaky kind of character...
...work was superb. There was none of the outrageous improvisation that marks Sellers' acting when he feels a project is going badly. "I was amazed at the discretion with which he handled the part," says Co-Star Melvyn Douglas. "Never was there a suggestion of having overblown any sense of it." Adds Richard Dysart, who played a doctor: "The texture of that man's work! He gave Hal Ashby two or three different characters?not that varied, but different. I began to see that there was a through line for each, that they were consistent." Ashby thus had not just...
...reflect back at everyone he meets whatever qualities they have projected on him. The woman (Shirley MacLaine) who takes him in after he has been injured in an encounter with her limousine sees him as a highly charged sexual being, although he is in fact a virgin. Her husband (Melvyn Douglas), a mighty captain of industry, believes him to be a Baruch-like financial wizard, since his few childlike responses to questions on these matters can be interpreted as metaphorical profundities. The President (Jack Warden) is similarly buffaloed by Chance's vague imagery, all of it drawn from the only...