Word: wallach
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...short, there is a little something for everybody in Crazy Joe - except those who insist on at least routine cinematic competence even in gangster movies. With Peter Boyle in the title role, and Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Charlie Cioffi and Luther Adler as supporting hoods, there is a fair amount of acting ability on hand, but each man seems to be working in a minimovie all his own. Director Lizzani is unable to find in Carlino's ripped-off script a solid tempo from which the actors might take a common beat. As a result, Crazy Joe never lives...
WALTZ OF THE TOREADORS, by Jean Anouilh, is supposed to be good, and with Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach in it, it probably is. 7:30 at the Colonial Theater in Boston...
Unfailingly attired in his uniform, General St. Pé (Eli Wallach) faces advancing middle age as if it were a court-martial. He is chained to a vixenish wife (Anne Jackson) who spews venom at him and pretends to be a dying invalid. In his high-romantic imagination, he is in thrall to the memories of a young girl (Diana Van Der Vlis) he waltzed with 17 years ago. St. Pé's dream girl appears, only to run off with his callow aide, and the general is left alone in the dusk...
Thanks to Anouilh's vividly ironic vision, much of the evening is howlingly funny. Wallach has always possessed perfect comic pitch and he displays it again here. However, he lacks that certain panache which makes St. Pé a duelist with destiny rather than a Good Soldier Schweik taking fate's pratfalls. Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts...
Beatrice (Joanne Woodward) once a clown-of-the-party, has become the party's debris, wasted and neglected. Her house is a pigsty, her yard cluttered with junk; one daughter, Ruth (Roberta Wallach), is an epileptic teenager, one, Mathilde (Newman's daughter), lost to her out of a love for biology. With slatternly hair and frowsy bathrobe, Beatrice drags out her days on too much coffee and too many cigarettes, reading the want ads and trying to sell dance tickets on the phone. She wisecracks non-stop to waylay despair, but her sense of humor has gone sour and grates...