Word: melvyn
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...gardener who does nothing but watch TV, tend to his plants, eat and sleep. His screenplay for Being There could hardly be more faithful to the novel. According to Kosinski's metaphorical fable, the TV-idiot, Chauncey Gardiner (Sellers), bumps his way to the mansion of influential, dying financier, Melvyn Douglas and his younger, sex-starved wife Shirley MacLaine. So limited is Gardiner's intelligence that his communication consists only of child-like imitations of people he has seen on TV or references to his beloved garden. The hilarity--and the irony--begins when Douglas, MacLaine, Douglas' friend the President...
...SCREENPLAY strains with the Kennedy model and an intrusive Hollywood morality. But the excellences in character acting balance any such flaws. Melvyn Douglas, a reliable old pro, plays the aging, once powerful Senator Birney, whose friendship Tynan must betray. Alda's best moments come when he is Douglas's foil; Tynan feels contempt for the old man's politics but cannot help sympathizing when Birney lapses into senility and the Cajun tongue of his youth. Rip Torn plays a hilarious cameo as the libidinous buffoon, Sen. Ritner...
...script creates an exhausting round robin of ethical and personal conflicts for its hero. Should Tynan lead the fight against a racist Supreme Court nominee, or should he remain silent out of deference to an old colleague (Melvyn Douglas)? Should he carry on an affair with a bright Southern civil rights lawyer (Meryl Streep) or remain faithful to his equally bright and attractive wife (Barbara Harris)? Should he pursue his presidential ambitions or spend more time at home with his increasingly estranged kids? Not only do these dilemmas have the aura of the casebook about them, but they are also...
...Soviet Union last week informed the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) it will grant a visa to Melvyn Nathanson, honorary research fellow in Mathematics, for the current academic year, reversing an August decision to deny him entry into the USSR on the NAS Soviet-American exchange program, a spokesman for NAS said yesterday...
...most vitriolic of the polemics was an extended "open letter" in Izvestia written by S.L. Lipavsky, a former dissident, whose claims were accompanied by an unsigned expose on U.S. espionage in Moscow. The articles accused the U.S. embassy's current first secretary, Joseph Presel, and his predecessor, Melvyn Levitsky, of heading a spy ring that persuaded leading dissidents to provide classified defense material for the Central Intelligence Agency. Curiously, the Americans and their alleged accomplices-Engineers Vladimir Slepak and Anatoli Shcharansky-are Jewish. In talks with Western newsmen, the two engineers promptly denied the allegations. So did State Department...