Word: shrewish
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...production hit a rough patch when Hawn tried to drop out shortly before shooting started. Paramount's Lansing played hardball, threatening to sue. "I'll take your house," an insider remembers her threatening. Hawn stayed in but asked for changes to make the women less shrewish. "I stuck with that bone and didn't let it go," she says. Addams Family Values screenwriter Paul Rudnick polished the script. And Midler, demanding more comedy, improvised some of her sharpest lines, including her comment to her husband's lithe mistress: "My, my. The bulimia certainly has paid...
...noir made the black widow an embodiment of evil as seductive as she was destructive. What man wouldn't want to go to hell with Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice? What man wouldn't prefer hell to two days in a motel room with the spectacularly shrewish Ann Savage in Detour...
...plays crabby geezers: the tourist with tsuris in Don't Drink the Water, a decrepit comic in a new version of The Sunshine Boys. Yet in his films Allen is the Woody of old--or, rather, of young. To Lenny, the raw, vibrant Linda makes Amanda seem stale and shrewish. Bonham Carter (who's a radiant 29 and certainly doesn't look shrewish) must play that standard Woody marplot, the older woman. Sure, Linda's got the screwball charm of the early Judy Holliday, but does every Allen superbabe have to be born yesterday...
...points, Haahr ceases to be lovable and becomes merely annoying. Selig and Haahr spend too much time wandering around the set with no apparent purpose, screaming their lines at each other in an excited shriek. Both characters often seem to be engaged less in witty verbal sparring than in shrewish quarreling. The fault here lies with director Alexander Franklin and Elisabeth Mayer, who seem to lose control of the play's pace. The dialogue moves beyond hectic into overload. The tension and excitement, rather than growing gradually between them, has built too fast and too early. The long-deterred climax...
...perfect family it appears to be. Mommy and Daddy are upset that they have no children, but they are given to occasional moments of cruelty that would render them unfit to be parents anyway. They also have TV-sized attention spans and short memories. Mommy is catty and shrewish. Daddy is timorous and impotent...