Word: stepson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sorry, French wonks and sports fans. The movie concerns a lady who takes one too many lovers, the fatal lover her stepson. That plot may be the plot of La Curee. But Vadim's treatment of the lady is highly un-Zolaesque. He doesn't condemn her as an unfortunate being who, because she slipped off the straight and narrow, can only slither around miserably. His treatment isn't an indictment. It's a celebration...
...energies to it. She spends hours exercising, massaging, creaming, bathing, costuming. Vadim follows Miss Fonda with witty conscientiousness through these rites. But her soul is in her pursuit, and the director shows that without joking. At one point she tries to drown herself because she fears the stepson (Peter McEnery) has given her up. She rescues herself at the last moment and lies fur-coated on the stones. Water drips and glistens on the fur. The image is of an animal at once sleek and suffering...
...critical, some petty -- seems particularly force. "In the second Hiss trial," writes Zeligs, "Chambers . . . testified that Richard [his brother] had died on September 19, 1926. Whether Chambers knew it or not (and it is likely that he did), September 19, 1926 was the birth date of Alger Hiss's stepson. Timothy Hobson (an easy slip away from September 9, 1926, the actual date of Richard's death)." Zeligs attempts to tie this error into a chain of meaningful mistakes on Chambers' part...
...Hiss could have been lying. Zeligs gives no credence at all to his incongruous but hardly indefensible possibility. Nor does he explore a number of other, more speculative theories about the Hiss case which might have lent themselves to psychoanalytic study. Several people suspected either Hiss's wife or stepson of being involved in the passing of documents to Chambers, but Zeligs, after mentioning these hypotheses, subtly changes the subject without ever testing them...
...wealthy widow (Anna Quayle) who consoles herself by bawling the Kashmiri Song ("Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar/ Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway far?") while she somehow makes her harp sound like a bedspring banged with a coal scuttle. Before long teeny Tony, her stepson and heir, just can't face the music. So he runs a wire from his toy-train set to the frame of the harp, transforming it into a colossal toaster that does stepmother up brown...