Word: tomlin
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Lily is Lily Tomlin-of course. The reporter is Lily Tomlin-of course. And the chameleon is Lily Tomlin too. Indeed, if someone were to ask the real Lily Tomlin to stand up this week when she opens her one-woman show on Broadway, there would be either dead silence-or a forest of waving hands...
...Lily Tomlin, at age 37, the woman with the kaleidoscopic face, is just about that clever herself. She becomes the embodiment of Edith Ann, Lupe, Rick, Tess and a dozen or so others so quickly and flawlessly that she fools even the pros. "I don't think Tomlin really acts," says Robert Benton, who directed her in the year's sleeper film hit, The Late Show. "Her imagination is so vast that she just assumes the personality of the character...
...Late Show. Art Carney trudges through the role of washed-up shamus Ira Wells, opposite Lily Tomlin's hippydippy hippy, who hires Wells to find her cat and leads them both into a big mess of a sinister imbroglio. Robert Benton, screenwriter and director, does a lot of borrowing, from both classic and more recent detective flicks, but does his cribbing in style. The actors, meanwhile, are heavily, and affectingly, into themselves: particularly the kharma and vibrations-obssessed Tomlin. With the same L.A. backdrop that the great Chandler stories grew out of, this one proves as well-oiled...
...first key angle in Robert Benton's script: the once respected and feared detective who's fallen on fallen times. Then there's the other angle: the funny lady who actually does ask him to sleuth down her cat. The woman, Margo Sperling, is played by Lily Tomlin. Her character comes straight out of a stock bit she does on television specials and in night-clubs: the astrology nut, pseudo-psychoanalyst and perpetual high-on-lifer all rolled into one. When Welles flashes a rod for the first time in her presence, she cheerfully informs him that "my shrink says...
...Carney and Tomlin elevate it. Carney may forever carry around like some prominent and embarassing tattoo his association with the hyper, dim-witted character of Ed in The Honeymooners. But here, like in Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto, he sheds that goofball image for a gritty grand-fatherliness. Tomlin is Tomlin, meanwhile: sensitive, talkative and--with all her blather about vibrations and kharmas--very, very funny. Yet what makes their two characters engaging and moving is the way they work together. If not a natural team, they both have become real pros and know how to make the audience...