Word: tales
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cosi Fan Tutte, a title truly impossible to translate, roughly means "Women Will Do It All the Time." And in this bubbling tale of feminine frailty, everything happens in pairs. There are two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and their lovers, Guglielmo and Ferrando, respectively. Things get rolling when Don Alfonso, an old conniver, bets Guglielmo and Ferrando that their loves would betray them, given the chance...
...suspension bridge, and the plot is a shoestring. A beatnik's beatnik, Harry Berlin (Alan Arkin), is poised for a suicidal leap. Up comes natty Milt Manville (Eli Wallach), who recognizes him as a onetime classmate at Poly-Arts U. They swap case histories. Harry tells a tale of existential woe that started when a fox terrier mistook his pant leg for a hydrant: "I was nauseous, sick to my soul, I became aware . . . aware of the whole rotten senseless stinking deal." Mimed in outrageously funny fashion by Alan Arkin, Harry is so sick that he goes momentarily rigid...
...reign in Spain, postulates the author, is "the cult of virility," and woman's fate is to be "enslaved and betrayed." On the reader's acceptance of this arch axiom teeters this over-suave tale. Its stagy business, and that of the Duchess of Combon de Triton, is to make her "appallingly stupid" cluke the first faithful husband in Spanish history. Her scheme is to win his compassion by feigning illness and his awe by submitting to surgical cures without anesthesia or a whimper. Some 30 agonizing operations later, the duke commits suicide. Now the widow, whose "only...
Cayatte's fundamental conception, to present a twice-told tale in the form of a double feature, is mildly stimulating. Unhappily, the marriage his movies describe is immoderately dull. She is a rat fink, he is a mouse fink, and their life together is stinking cheese. After inhaling Anatomy of a Marriage (as the films are collectively called) for almost four hours, an audience can only numbly wonder how Cayatte could imagine that two bad movies would make a good...
...Fair Lady is indestructible showmanship. The Lerner and Loewe Cinderella tale based on Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion sets Shavian sparkle to music with such unerring good taste that it could probably be performed in Urdu by a cast of untouchables without suffering serious damage. Hollywood, praise be, can do a whole lot better than that. In this literal, beautiful, bountiful version of the most gilt-edged attraction in theater history, Jack Warner has miraculously managed to turn gold into gold. Last week, sporting all her familiar tunes along with a fall collection of eye-popping new finery, Fair Lady...