Word: rachel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This old and unreliable cliché remains in vogue precisely because it is a comfort to the cynically inert conscience. Why risk a moral stance if evil, greed and calculated self-interest will invariably win out? Win they certainly do in The Visit. Clara Zachanassian (Rachel Roberts), a middle-aging, much-married multimillionairess, has come back to her impoverished home town of Gullen with a rather special proposition. She will bestow half a billion marks on the town and another half a billion to be divided equally among its citizens in return for what might be called Salome...
While the two leads can scarcely dispel the powerful memory of the 1958 Lunt-Fontanne production, they establish their own interpretations with unstrained validity. Rachel Roberts brings a commandingly icy meanness to Clara while hinting at a lost tenderness. In recent seasons, John McMartin has established himself as an actor of distinctive range. He has played the disenchanted author in Follies, the skeptical servant Sganarelle in Moliere's Don Juan, and the mask-divided soul Dion Anthony in O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Now, as the hero of The Visit, he is initially bland, wistfully...
When Stewart Stern wrote Rachel, Rachel for Miss Woodward, he displayed a gift for biting dialogue and for transforming ordinary situations into sequences that carry a sharp sting of recognition. The same ability is repeated here, notably at a family funeral where the mourners try to hide their dislike of one another. Gilbert Gates directed I Never Sang for My Father, an underrated film that was also about family tensions. He shows himself once again to be an unpretentious director with a talent for worming himself to the emotional core of characters and scenes...
What happens is this. There's this coffee salesman--that's Malcolm McDowell--who gets a promotion from this vampy lady who's the Public Relations officer in the Coffee company. She's Rachel Roberts. She and some other actors end up playing several roles apiece so that McDowell keeps getting into situations that you kind of think have happened before. I guess that must have something to do with the movie wanting to be an epic. Anyway, the P.R. lady ends up getting the salesman to bed. That happens alot in this movie. Like every woman McDowell bumps into...
Besides McDowell, the superb cast includes Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe, Helen Mirren, Dandy Nichols, Mona Washbourne and Graham Crowden, each of whom appears in at least two different roles. This is done to underscore the prevailing sense of strangeness, to give everything an eerie continuity and, quite characteristically and properly, just for the merry hell...