Word: natwick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Playwright Neil Simon has adapted his boffo Broadway comedy to the screen with no loss of humor, largely owing to the retention of Original-Cast Members Robert Redford and Mildred Natwick and the canny addition of Jane Fonda...
When Redford remonstrates, Fonda starts sniping-only to sign a false charmistice when her middle-class mother (Mildred Natwick) arrives. Before long, they are joined by a randy reprobate of a neighbor (Charles Boyer) known as "the Bluebeard of Tenth Street." Bluebeard leads the way to an Albanian hash house that serves such delicacies as black salad and ouzo. The foursome eventually wend their way home, whereupon Fonda and Redford drunkenly declare...
...weather. "Your laundry arrived," she simpers. "They stuffed your shirts beautifully." But if the couple's happiness seems as short as their tempers, their misery is just as temporary. By the final reel they are neck and neck in a race for the bed, and even Natwick and Boyer have found something in common-stomach trouble...
...made, notably Fonda for Broadway's Elizabeth Ashley. Jane's performance is the best of her career: a clever caricature of a sex kitten who can purr or scratch with equal intensity. Among the tastiest leftovers from the stage are Redford as the harassed groommate and Mildred Natwick, skittering on the edge of hysteria as she articulates the film's philosophy to her daughter: "Make him feel important. If you do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage, like two out of every ten couples...
Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford are one couple in ten thousand. Their romantic good looks and deft comic timing give the play a believable illogic in which farce becomes fairy tale. As one of the world's funnier women, Mildred Natwick can verbally give a line the same corkscrewy twist that Margaret Rutherford manages with massive facial quirks. Nowadays, when even the comic muse pulls a long face, a smiling, unalloyed joy awaits those who hotfoot it to Barefoot...