Word: one
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cactus Flower answers one of the less pressing but more engaging questions facing America today: Can Laugh-In's Goldie Hawn really act? Yes, she can, and so can Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman. With that kind of cast, a Sears, Roebuck catalogue could serve as a script, and Cactus Flower is far more than that. Director Gene Saks is no Billy Wilder, but Wilder's collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) is still I.A.L. Diamond, and he knows funny lines when he writes them. Ornamenting Abe Burrows' stage hit (itself an adaptation...
...longs to be an exclamation point. Goldie is a natural reactress; her timing is so canny that even her tears run amusingly. In recent years Broadway comedies have not survived translation into film. Although unpretentious, Cactus Flower succeeds on screen, thanks to two old masters-and a shiny new one-who have learned that actors get known by the comedy they keep...
...machinery of the story is simple. One night, drunk and excited at the sight of blood (from a razor slash on one of their wrists), four young men draw numbers from a hat and seemingly in jest agree to kill themselves in order, without revealing the pact or the motive. The four are loners, dependent upon each other in tangled psychological ways. Adler is a fat, ugly and lonely neuter from the Ozarks, who cannot reconcile his hillbilly background with his aspirations in botany and his love of dance and literature. Pless, a young psychologist whose feelings have been frozen...
...Last of the Wine, The King Must Die). Here she appears to be limited by her slightly blinkered view of Alexander. Granting him his historic virtues-precocity, courage, leadership and tactical genius-she dissembles on the crucial matter of his sexuality. After Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaistion (one of his generals) were the best-known best friends of the ancient world. In the novel, however, though the author surrounds her hero with Hephaistion, an overt invert, and a band of other young men, Alexander himself remains pure, sublimated and inevitably prissy. He not only has no faults...
...fact, according to Plutarch, who started the legend, Alexander wept because, with an infinity of worlds, he had not yet fully conquered even one...