Word: spider
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Given Hollywood's current taste for Spielbergian light-and magic shows, an "actor's movie" is a dying breed. But in Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film mixing the dangerous ingredients of politics and movie glamour itself, the actors' contributions are paramount...
...runners-up) were awarded to Birdy, an American film directed and produced by Englishmen, and Colonel Redl, a period political drama made under German, Austrian and Hungarian aegis. The choice for best actor was American Star William Hurt, playing an imprisoned homosexual in the Brazilian film Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on a novel by the Argentine Manuel Puig. Insignificance, which took the technical prize, was the official British entry, but its setting (Manhattan), cast (including Tony Curtis) and characters (fictionalized renderings of Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein and Senator Joseph McCarthy) were uniquely American...
Actress Sonia Braga, 34, seems to have a penchant for multiples on the screen. In her most famous role, the Brazilian Loren played Dona Flor, she of the two husbands. And now Braga has a three-part undertaking. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, two prisoners, played by Raul Julia and William Hurt, pass time in jail as Hurt's character recounts the plots of early Hollywood movies he has seen, including one about a French chanteuse named Leni Lamaison and another about the title Spider Woman. Braga plays both, as well as Julia's girlfriend...
Will it help to explain that his nickname was Spider? Spider Nissen. Henry Nissen, a.k.a. Hank Nissen, a.k.a. Spider Nissen and the last clung to him like a bad smell. He had a touch of the hyena for that matter--the same we-eat-tainted-meat-together intimacy that burns out of a hyena's eyes behind the bars of his cage. So Spider Nissen would look at me and give a giggle as if we had both had a girl together, and each took turns sitting on her head...
...EARLY SCENE, in which Reve has just left the club with Christine, alerts us--in case the spider hadn't--that something is amiss. Maneuvering her flashy little sports car with suicidal abandon. Christine spirits Reve through a metaphysical traffic jam of omens, from bloody accidents to a neon sign that spells "spider" in Dutch on the front of her house. Later that night, Reve finds himself tormented with particularly nasty castration dreams that feature Christine wielding a pair of scissors in her blue-painted claws. Lest we dismiss the scene as a chuckle at Reve's castration complex...