Word: thayer
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...lives of Norman Thayer Jr. and his wife Ethel unfold, it becomes apparent that they have been spared none of the vicissitudes of aging except poverty. He is a retired professor, and there is obviously good breeding and a bit of money in their backgrounds. But the isolation of old age is upon them. No close friends are left on the pond; their only child Chelsea has been estranged from her father since childhood and now almost never comes home. Divorced, childless, she is living the worrisome ad hoc life of the fortyish woman who is still trying to find...
...moguls and a newsreel camera. Someone important might have been there to introduce these two acting legends about to cross paths for the first time. "Alice Adams, meet Young Mr. Lincoln. Mary of Scotland, this is Wyatt Earp. Tracy Lord, Tom Joad. Tess Harding, Mister Roberts. Ethel Thayer, say hello to Norman Thayer Jr. Katharine Hepburn. . .Henry Fonda...
...about the time, 46 years, that has soldered Norman and Ethel Thayer to each other, with complementary quirks and habits, tolerance and humor, love and concern. The time it takes to bind wounds the generations can inflict on each other?Norman and his daughter, Henry and his Jane. The time Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn have taken to travel their separate roads to this special union. The time on the screen that displays the deceptively easy effects of two actors, two half-centuries committed to getting it right in the theater and the movies. It is about this time?now?...
...authentic human spirit. She also makes me laugh." And the smile in Hepburn's voice breaks into the chime of an unself-conscious laugh?for, surely, the woman being described is not only Ethel Thayer but Katharine Houghton Hepburn...
...describes might not be just Norman Thayer Jr., but Spencer Tracy. Or Henry Jaynes Fonda. One of this film's reverberant pleasures comes from watching Fonda play what might have been a Tracy role if Spencer had lived a dozen or so more years. Norman, after all, possesses the hearty irascibility that Tracy seemed born with, and that Fonda achieved only in the making of On Golden Pond. At the beginning of the film, as Fonda lumbers about in gusts of frail menace, he angles toward playing a New England Lear with overcareful pungency. One gets the sense of Fonda...