Word: velvets
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...Fairy Queen's remark about being able to "swing upon a cobweb," he opened the show by dropping in a huge cobweb. This denial of a broad spectrum only serves to heighten the impact of the ensuing magnificent procession of Peers, fifteen strong, resplendently garbed and sporting rich velvet capes of different colors. The music itself not only parodies marches by Bellini, Meyerbeer, Wagner and Verdi but is also better than the pieces it satirizes. And the chorus of lords makes a full, lusty sound -- without the awful electronic amplification that mars most musical theater these days. These are Peers...
Poor Tatum is not totally responsible for the failings of International Velvet. A belated sequel to National Velvet (1944), the movie has a leaden gait that no actress could quicken. The blame belongs to Writer-Director Bryan Forbes, who seems to be unduly embarrassed about making a horse-race picture. Rather than tell his hokey story in a crisp manner, he has gussied up the action with dreary psychological motifs and pseudoliterary writing. International Velvet should have had the exhilarating spirit of the recent quarter-horse-race film, Casey's Shadow-or at least the plodding charm of National...
...original Velvet Brown, the young and glorious Elizabeth Taylor ran her horse Pie to victory in England's Grand National. Now, Velvet is a high-strung middle-aged woman (Nanette Newman) who lives in sin with a blocked novelist known as John (Christopher Plummer). Tatum plays Sarah Velvet Brown, a recently orphaned niece who ar rives from Arizona to live with her aunt. Once she meets Pie's latest foal, history very slowly but surely repeats itself...
Unfortunately, Sarah's path to an Olympics gold medal is strewn with Freudian booby traps. Aunt Velvet, it seems, has still not recovered from a miscarriage she suffered after being thrown by Pie years earlier. John has not only problems at the typewriter but a patho logical fear of marriage. Both these characters discuss their neuroses at great length, often in voice-over narration that accompanies Forbes' extensive travelogue footage of British scenic vistas. Young Sarah, meanwhile, finds herself unable to make friends among her peers. In one gratuitously jarring incident, a cruel class mate presents her with...
Humans come off less well: with the exception of Anthony Hopkins as an Olympic team trainer, all the performances are flat. It's particularly sad that Elizabeth Taylor was unavailable to resume the role of Velvet. Even at her latter-day worst, she's a far more compelling presence than Nanette Newman. Better still, she might have given Tatum more than a few pointers about how to grow up gracefully on the big screen...