Word: waif
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three recent films take a different approach. For the dead-end kids at the center of each film, morality is a gray area; only their lives are black and blue. Hector Babenco's Pixote (Portuguese slang for peewee) is an eleven-year-old São Paulo waif living his long days in a kind of Dotheboys Hall for juvenile offenders. In another school, pleasing the older boys might mean carrying the water bucket; here it involves stashing dope, spearheading escapes and, above all, keeping his big dark eyes open and his mouth shut. The film is canny enough...
...best moments. But at least it points to a kind of theatre beyond the blank, muddy "reality" that the rest of these plays have a foot in. Mark Milliken has staged Fits and Starts with merry rambunctiousness, and the piece is fetchingly danced by Julia Newton, an utterly charming waif. Annette Miller and John Adair, though, as mother and dog respectively, again display little variety or subtlety in their delivery...
...category is movie star. It is especially not easy if one of your adopted children turns out to be the spoiled and charmless brat portrayed in this silly movie about the domestic life of Joan Crawford. The sympathy one is supposed to feel for the poor little rich waif (played at different ages by Mara Hobel and Diana Scarwid) slides away from her and onto the fashionably padded shoulders of the actress, whom Faye Dunaway's makeup artist, Lee C. Harman, gets just right. It was Crawford, after all, who had the career problems, the man problems, the drinking...
...sting unknown to the soaps. Helen (Valerie French), a middle-aged lady of slippery virtue, deserts her teen-age daughter Jo (Amanda Plummer) to marry a piratical con man in a Hathaway patch (John Carroll) who is visibly her junior. Jo, a kind of spitfiery waif, gets involved with a black sailor (Tom Wright) who ships out leaving her pregnant. A good Samaritan homosexual (Keith Reddin) moves into Jo's dreary unheated flat to care...
...eight, the St. Louis waif was farmed out as a servant. At 13, after hanging around a local theater, she signed on to the vaudeville circuit and made two discoveries: she could hold a note, and she could hold an audience...