Word: shlemiel
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...plot of Play It Again, Sam is a simple and perfect vehicle for Allen's shlemiel persona, here called Allan Felix. Felix's wife has just left him, and he bemoans his impossibly bad luck with women. His harried businessman friend Dick Christie (Nick Raposo) arrives with his flaky wife Linda (Lucy Soutter) to comfort him. They try to fix him up with dates until Felix realizes that he's fallen in love with Linda, and that through his relationship with her he's finally overcome his total lack of confidence with women. Along the way, Felix, a writer...
...original that he still finds the whole subject extremely painful. But that setback didn't dissuade Isaac Bashevis Singer, 80, from launching two new plays off-Broadway. A Play for the Devil is currently running in Yiddish at the Folksbiene Theater, and a dramatic adaptation of his story Shlemiel, the First just closed at the Jewish Repertory Theater. Singer, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, has no illusions about the differences between drama and literature, however. "I don't feel as experienced as a playwright as I am at writing stories," he admits. "Still...
...such a tramp?" the win some shlemiel (Coluche) asks his best friend's girl (Isabelle Huppert). "Oh, I've had lots of practice," she shrugs. "I was lucky to start very young." When Writer-Director Bertrand Blier turns his attention to the precocious young (a 13-year-old genius in Get Out Your Handkerchiefs; a budding stepdaughter in Beau-Pere) he creates sexual fables poised on the brink of moral anarchy. No such luck in My Best Friend's Girl (La Femme de Mon Pole), an "adult" triangle about a sad-sack disc jockey and a tall...
...Woody Allen in AMNSC to remind the still faithful of the old abundant pleasures. The interweaving themes are sex and love; the tone is summer-solstice warm; the six characters dance an amorous roundelay whose steps are guided by biology, sympathy and caprice. Woody is again the chronically lovable shlemiel, torn between his passion for the ethereal Ariel (Mia Farrow) and his longing for the wife (Mary Steenburgen) he cannot satisfy sexually. When he tries and she finds his ardor disgusting, he retorts, "How can it be? I haven't taken my clothes off yet." Allen's directorial...
Harlan (Dennis Lipscomb) thinks he's Bogie: swatting his cigarette lighter open, swigging Seagram's from a pint bottle, talking tough to the little lady. He's not. He's a middle-aged shlemiel of an accountant-a surly, sulky Bob Newhart-with a restless young wife and a fatal case of paranoia. Lillian (Deborah Harry) thinks she's Betty Bacall: purple nightgowns, lots of makeup and suggestive patter, gentleman friend on the side. She's not. She's a housewife who cannot keep house, and whose only escape from her drab apartment...