Word: milk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams. A rich old clownish woman rages desperately against the good night of death, until a Christ-figure comforts her tormented soul. Hermione Baddeley plays the dying woman with blinding, blistering brilliance...
...Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, by Tennessee Williams, is his first unequivocally symbolic and undeviatingly religious allegory. It will certainly repel devotees of realism. It will equally certainly make Hermione Baddeley the most envied actress on the island of Manhattan, since she has been given another of the playwright's memorable roles for women, Flora Goforth, whom she portrays with blinding blistering brilliance. Playgoers inured to the calculated trivia of Broadway may be infuriated, touched to the quick, or turned stone-deaf at being asked, in all seriousness, to contemplate the state of their souls...
...strange contest ensues, in which she barters for his body and he gambles to save her soul. On the surface, Milk Train is Flora's story and incontestably Hermione Baddeley's vehicle. She can put the chill of mortality into a sibilant whisper, all vanity into a grandiose Churchillian lisp, all lechery into a creamy smirk. As she coughs, groans and rages about the stage, she is larger than death...
...subsurface tracks of meaning, Milk Train speeds toward a surprisingly different destination: an allegory of the temptation of Christ. As Boston Drama Critic George E. Ryan of The Pilot perceptively noted during the pre-Broadway tryouts, Chris is both St. Christopher and a Christ figure. Christopher means Christ-bearer. Chris arrives at Flora Goforth's burdened with a pack so weighty that he stumbles. In legend, St. Christopher carries a child across a river, and suddenly, finding the weight almost too great to bear, discovers that he is carrying Jesus, who in turn bears the sins of the world...
...Perrys tried to get the backing of a major studio, they were not-as custom would have it-turned away icily by the crass boobs of Hollywood. They were just turned away. It lacked size, and the great paradox of movie financing is that it's easy to milk fortunes out of Hollywood for high-budget stupendaganzas, but next to impossible to get a couple of hundred thousand for a low-budget picture. "We can't afford to make small pictures," said U.A. "We have too much overhead." The dimensions of the Perrys' story were necessarily small...