Word: petulia
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...through his Eden. Walkabout suddenly becomes a lyric travelogue, assaulting the harsh Flinders mountain ranges, trailing the little camels of the red desert near Alice Springs, mooning under the blooming quandong tree. Director Nicolas Roeg, who made his reputation as a cinematographer (Fahrenheit 451, Far from the Madding Crowd. Petulia), shows a precise and delicate Down Understanding. But give him anything human, and he seems as naive as a third former...
...seems at first far too facile and fragile an idea for a full-length movie: the roller derby as a metaphor for America's competition, violence, degradation. Scenes of derby competition worked well in films like Petulia and Medium Cool because they were used as secondary symbols, episodes that were part of a more complex whole. But an entire feature devoted to the derby, its stars and its lifestyles? Director-Cameraman Robert Kaylor confounds all expectations in Derby. He does it by treating the competition not as a symbol but as a sorry fact of life...
...says that "after three days' rehearsal for Plaza Suite I told him I didn't know what I was going to do with him for the next three weeks because he was perfect. But he stayed around anyway, working with the other actors." Richard Lester, who directed Scott in Petulia, found him "intelligent, constructive, decent, professional. If there was a difference of opinion between us, we worked it out in five or ten minutes." Enormously sure of his own instinct for material, Scott was handed the manuscript of Plaza Suite in a restaurant by Playwright Neil Simon; he left...
...Then, gradually, he began to pick up the pieces. He worked for the first time under Mike Nichols' direction in the Lincoln Center revival of The Little Foxes. And he appeared in what may be his finest screen portrayal, the doctor in Richard Lester's superb film Petulia...
Scott seems to have invested more than the usual portion of his personal anguish and anger in the role of Archie, an affluent San Francisco physician newly separated from his wife, who falls crazily in love with a tormented bitch named Petulia. Lester's film contains some of the best sequences of sexual and romantic tension ever caught by a camera, and Scott provides most of them. In one memorable scene, his ex-wife has come to visit him and brings a bag of homemade cookies with her as a peace offering. As the discussion becomes edgier and more hostile...