Word: tess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...peasant dress, with locks tumbling down her back, she was the essence of pouty innocence in Roman Polanski's Tess. Well, take another look, because in Francis Coppola's upcoming musical One from the Heart, set in the Las Vegas world of neon nights, Actress Nastassia Kinski, 20, plays a circus performer with the wily ways of a seductress twice her age. Heart is being billed as "a fantasy about love, jealousy and sex." From the look of things, Nastassia fills the bill...
...flimsy substance of it is a reshaping of the 1942 Hepburn-Tracy film. Instead of a journalistic pundit patterned on Dorothy Thompson (Hepburn's role), Tess Harding (Bacall) is now a TV panjandrum a la Barbara Walters. Tracy's no-non sense sportswriter, Sam Craig, has be come a syndicated cartoonist (Harry Guardino) whose creation, Katz, is a kind of common man's alley cat sociologist...
...KATZ is flashed on a back-panel screen from time to time for sardonic wisdom and minor laughs.) Tess and Sam do not meet cute; they meet silly. She launches on a TV diatribe about how cretinous the "funnies...
...settle for smaller favors and find out just how small they are. The Kan-der-Ebb music and lyrics are amiable but pallid. Still, they do offer some comic relief. In It Isn 't Working and / Told You So, Tess's secretary (Roderick Cook) and her maid (Grace Keagy) team up to pepper below-the-salt potshots at Tess and Sam's splintering love life. The evening's high spot consists of Tess and a humble housewife (Marilyn Cooper) agreeing that The Grass Is Always Greener - a lowlife, high-life duet. Cooper makes this sequence...
Peter Firth plays Tess' pious husband and Leigh Lawson the sly rogue who seduces her. Under Polanski's direction, both characters are shallow and tiresome. Firth and Lawson, both competent actors, struggle to give compelling performances--but with Sarde's strings rising behind them as they utter lines like "Is there no hope for me? I'm dying for you my darling," they fight a losing battle...