Word: neil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scoring: Y. Ed McManus (Kevin Conley, Jim Sheiner) 4:25; H. Alan Litchfield (Neil Sheehy, Jim Turner...
Screenplay by Sandy Howard, Kenneth Peters and Robert Vincent O'Neil...
...Norman Thayer a retired professor rounding 80, Fonda plays the curmudgeon to the hilt. Thompson's script is very much in the Neil Simon mold since it is one great aggregation of one-liners, and Fonda gets the lion's share of them. The jokes are a bit softer and more countrified than Simon's bitchy repartee. but Fonda succeeds in putting enough spin on them to give the dialogue bite. His deadpan is convincing. He puckers up his chin a little and blows the quips out like a man nonchalantly shooting marbles from his mouth into a brass spittoon...
...lives on the wrong side of the tracks after the tracks are torn up? Neil Simon has reworked and revived his 1962 musicomedy farce, complete with Cy Coleman's winningly melodic score, but he cannot restore its sociological geography. His brassy heroine, the evocatively named Belle Poitrine (Mary Gordon Murray), a non-lady who is a bona fide tramp, wants to acquire culture, fame, wealth and social acceptance. In 1982, culture is a two-syllable word that has disappeared from most vocabularies, and a bona fide tramp has a hammerlock on fame, wealth and social acceptance, provided she selects...
...Neil Simon is probably tired of hearing that his work subsists on absurdist non sequiturs, deli-flavored New York humor and crisp punch-liners. So what else is new? Not Little Me, alas...