Word: thayers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Norman Thayer a retired professor rounding 80, Fonda plays the curmudgeon to the hilt. Thompson's script is very much in the Neil Simon mold since it is one great aggregation of one-liners, and Fonda gets the lion's share of them. The jokes are a bit softer and more countrified than Simon's bitchy repartee. but Fonda succeeds in putting enough spin on them to give the dialogue bite. His deadpan is convincing. He puckers up his chin a little and blows the quips out like a man nonchalantly shooting marbles from his mouth into a brass spittoon...
...Thayer's wile, Ethel--Norman and Ethel, now there's a pair of old folk's names--is utterly sunny. As Ethel. Hepburn, is a sort of superannuated dryad, prancing in the woods, picking berries, skinny-dipping and crooning paeans to nature. By no means an airhead. Ethel happily flips the birdie at a passing motor cruiser that ploughs by the Thayers' canoe. Moreover, she knows Norman is not the crotchety old coot he appears. Rather, he is a wonderfully warm fellow who happens to be obsessed with death. Norman and Ethel are, of course, very much in love...
Upperclassmen living in Adams, Claverly, Kirkland, Winthrop and parts of Leverett, North and South Houses, as well as freshmen living in Greenough, Hurlbut, Lionel, Massachusetts, and Thayer and Mower Halls will be able to shut off excess heat this winter by manipulating the valves, which have been adapted to radiators...
...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...
Thompson's play?a critical success and modest hit on Broadway, with Frances Sternhagen and Tom Aldridge as the Thayers?almost filled the bill: it had everything but a role for Peter. "My dad isn't exactly Norman Thayer, but there's a lot of Dad in the part. And I guess there's a lot of Chelsea, Norman's daughter, in me. Like Chelsea, I had to get over the desperate need I once had for his approval, and to conquer my fear of him. We've never been intimate...