Word: torvald
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...vigor and passion of commitment, however, and the cast is superb. Trevor Howard's Dr. Rank is gruffly tender; Delphine Seyrig's Kristine, a woman of tentative but dependable dignity; and Edward Fox's Krogstad, a figure of understandable desperation. David Warner makes Torvald into a complex, insidious but always human figure. It is a performance of the foremost skill and intelligence, and includes a quick moment-when, with meticulous condescension, he mimics Nora sewing-that is worth a gross of pamphlets and essays on sexism...
...than Claire Bloom's airy Nora, a stage performance recently translated to film (TIME, June 18). One thing Fonda manages well is the delicate transition behind the closed bedroom door. As in the play, we do not see Nora change, but when Fonda comes out again to confront Torvald and prepare to leave, the viewer feels he can calibrate the painful inches by which the decision has been reached. Her fire and intelligence cause all the melodrama in the moment to fall aside and reveal a hard truth...
...dying father's signature (to save him pain) on a sum of money she borrowed to pay her husband's rest cure bills. It had never occurred to her that the action might be illegal--to her it was a human duty as daughter and wife. But when Torvald discovers her crime, he is blind to its noble aspects. To him, the damage done his honor counts for more than the love that prompted it. Only when he works himself into an apoplectic fit over the prospect of disgrace, only when he screams at Nora for scarring his name, when...
...When Torvald tells her that he could not, as man, sacrifice his honor for love, there is a silence as if the shot fired at Sarajevo had just been heard the world round. Then Nora turns to the camera with a real smash below the belt, "Millions of women have." She looks like a continental Uncle Sam jabbing his recruiting "We Want You" finger straight into your stomach. Imagine how this fired the moral fervor of the ladies in the suburbs of Detroit...
...Torvald, for instance, is limned as the stuffed-shirt the more to accent Nora's radicalism. Torvald is the petty bourgeois straight arrow with no doubts about his superior sex role. But her rejection of empty role-playing is primitive and barely conscious. Her rebellion against what she knows to be wrong does not give her a clue as to what else is right. She sees no farther than the either-or choice confronting her directly: either she submits to the futile prospect of a life spent fortifying the egoism of her man, or she rejects men. Never does...