Word: sarandons
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...best surprise of the production is Prince Hal, originally to have been played by Richard Thomas, who withdrew to work on a television film. His successor is Chris Sarandon, whose Hal turns out to be just splendid. I had seen him on stage and screen in modern parts, but nothing prepared me for the admirably trained classical actor he proves to be. Sarandon is now 40, but he has no trouble convincing us that he is a young man half his age, right down to the way he lolls on a bench He speaks clearly, clearly, and musically...
...Sarandon delivers this speech with serious intensity, and makes one believe that he is indeed a kind of proto-Hamlet, putting on a show and maintaining a measure of inner detachment Quite consistently, he retrains from displaying as much love for Falstaff as Falstaff shows to him. And Sarandon's facial expression on finding the "dead" Falstaff alive after all is absolutely wondrous...
Malle animates his vision of a contemporary Gomorrah with an intelligent deployment of detail and hovering shots of inanimate scenes. Some of his ironic directorial comments are almost absurdist: After mob punks kill Joe for stealing their coke, his estranged wife Sally (Susan Sarandon) is left to dispose of the body. When she arrives at the hospital to take a look, there's a gala ceremony to christen its new "Frank Sinatra wing," and right down the hall from Joe's corpse peacock-plumed dancers are kicking their feet while a blow-dried singer (Robert Goulet) croons. "I'm glad...
Lancaster plays Lou, an aging numbers-runner who moves in on Sarandon to help her after Joe's death, courts her, saves her from the mob, and eventually gives her the means to get out of the casino town. In their several romantic encounters, Sarandon's cool-headed, warm-hearted social climber comes off as a well-rounded if simple character: "Tell me stuff," she earnestly asks Lou, wanting to know about French wines, Italian opera, good living. Whether John Guare's screenplay or Lancaster's mole-like blindness to subtlety is responsible, though, Lou never acts like anything...
Malle's characters are always cleaning themselves, washing their hands, trying to rid themselves of the soot and the smells of their city. In the film's opening shot, Sarandon goes through a ritual of purification that appears like a refrain through the movie: to remove the fish-smell from her body after her workday as an oyster-bar waitress, she squeezes lemon-halves over her arms, shoulders, chest and breasts. Dingily unerotic, bathed in orange light, the sequence seems more satanic than baptismal. It distills the almost misanthropic repulsion towards this city that guides Malle's direction: nothing...