Word: sherin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Edwin Sherin has elicited a remarkable set of performances from his fourteen main characters, with only two exceptions. Lee Richardson's Undershaft is best of all-forceful and unshakeable from start to finish. (And he really plays the prescribed tune from Doninetti's Lucia on a trombone). Lady Brit is his separated wife, a woman given to bossing and tossing off epigrams--clearly modeled on Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, written a decade earlier. Jan Miner, in a performance that brings to mind Jessica Tandy, is doing in this role far and away...
Valdei Is Coming offers little besides its star. Continual editorials about racism give the film contrived relevance. Edwin Sherin's direction may best be described as functional: the members of the cast do not bump into each other. Still, the late Frank Silvera provides a poignant closeup of a peasant with aristocratic sensibility. The rest of the hard-nosed crew are sufficiently malignant to villainize five spaghetti westerns...