Word: patly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ready to celebrate. Here he was riding down "the Avenue," leading his triumphal parade to the White House. There was Pat on the Inaugural stand, hugging Mamie, and here was Nixon sitting in a quiet corner of the White House, tooling his Inaugural Address. They hung where Nixon could see them every morning when he strode over from the mansion to go to work...
Gilbert's original subject had been the "American Dream", and the family he chose to film exemplified that dream: Bill Loud, aged 50, a mining consultant who had firmly established his niche in the upper middle class: his wife Pat, aged 45, a Stanford graduate become housewife; and their five children, ages 13 to 20, attractive, articulate, and very "with-it." Confident and secure, the Louds welcomed the cameras and sound recorders into their home and offered their private lives to a very public scrutiny. Seven months later, Bill and Pat had separated on their way to a divorce...
...then recapitulating the previous seven months. From the first episode, Gilbert tried to exploit the audience's morbid curiosity about marital failure (bred of long years of afternoon suds drama) by making the Louds' separation the touchstone of his story. He counterpoints a painful phone conversation between Bill and Pat four months after their separation by flashing back to a breakfast at the start of the filming to show the couple "at the beginning of the end." Gilbert goes to such pains to dramatize the action, that one may forget it is real. And even so he bores...
...second episode--in which Pat visits her 20-year-old son Lance who is living in a New York hotel while looking for a "creative" job--typifies Gilbert's pointlessness. Lance is a lazy vapid young fellow with more than his share of pipe dreams and illusions. Pat is clearly sharp enough to see through his pretensions, but she does not make the effort: no Stanford graduate who has taken to frying eggs and making beds wants to tell her son that he should abandon his dreams. All of this becomes obvious almost from the time Pat arrives and begins...
...Some of my cheering is just natural enthusiasm but also I'm trying to take a leadership role. Guys get satisfaction out of getting a pat on the back after they make a good play...