Word: tess
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...that might well have been updated. Based on the 1942 MGM movie of the same name, which starred Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the musical version keeps the story line almost intact, with the perhaps inevitable change of the lead form a newspaper woman to a television anchor. She, Tess Harding, first insults, then falls in love with a cartoonist, Joe Craig (a sportswriter in the movie), and tries to balance marriage and career...
Perhaps the producers recognized this might happen, for Woman of the Year is filled with theater gimmicks old and new, all in a fairly transparent attempt to deflect attention from the show's fundamental shortcomings. There are almost a dozen flashy sets, and many use television--remember, Tess is an anchorwoman--to give the stage a busy, electronic feel. And Craig as a cartoonist yields an elaborate set of video projections of his work, including one song during which he does a duet with an animated version of his own cartoon. For all the technological hoopla, the song characteristically falls...
...Director Roman Polanski, who cast her in Tess, she is the "new Ingrid Bergman, a supernova." To Alberto Lattuada, who directed her in Stay As You Are (1980), she is "a mixture of poison and nectar." more the latter at the box office. But to her own mind, German-born Nastassja Kinski, 20, is, like her actor-father Klaus, simply, "a professional." Asked to close-crop her luxuriant locks for Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart, the actress instantly complied. "I do whatever the role requires," says the now almost tressless Tess. -By Claudia Wallis...
...Tess seems to be more an act of atonement than of creation, Roman Polanski's way of saying he's sorry for his scandalous reputation and his status as a fugitive from American-or at least Cal-ifornian-justice. He is telling the world that underneath it all, he is really a very serious fellow, if by serious one means that he is as capable as Irving Thalberg or David O. Selznick or any other old time mogul of making a handsomely illustrated version of a literary classic...
...emerges from his endless version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with a sense that one could have read the book in a shorter span and had more fun too. There is no question that Polanski's images-with Brittany doubling for "Wessex"-are frequently striking. He does less well by Tess, the poor doomed girl who, forced to rise above her station by family ambition, is ruined by a rascally wastrel and then misunderstood by the prig to whom she gives her heart. Everyone the director sets to moving through Wessex clumps along...