Word: widowing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Charlotte Douglas is the victim of a romantic idealism so hermetic that self-knowledge is impossible. The currents of revolution and privilege scarcely ruffle her hair. Incapable of reflection, Charlotte moves, therefore she is. This unexamined life is filtered through the tough mind of Grace Strasser-Mendana, Colorado-born widow of a Boca Grande plutocrat...
After that, it is the Communists' turn. They are represented by a husband-wife team of rich dilettantes, whose aim is to turn the widow into a proletarian heroine. Their sheer companionship is helpful, especially since Frau Kusters' son and his pregnant wife flee to Finland to avoid the scandal, while her daughter uses all the sudden notoriety to try to further her tacky career as a cabaret artiste. But the party is not really interested in clearing the Kusters name, just in exploiting it as propaganda. Finally, Mother Kusters goes off with a building janitor, who offers...
...Hill installs as his new board of directors all the little people who helped him beat his deadline - a widow, a kindly barfly, a dispossessed rancher, a cable-car conductor, and so on. The Frank Capra of Mr. Deeds would have used this simplistic notion to say something stirring, if sentimental, about social inequities and financial gouging. Here the situation is squandered for a few strained jokes. The viewer is left with the uncharitable suspicion that the conglomerate - and the film - would have been better off in the hands of experts with less good intentions...
...artfully accomplished cast, Anne DeSalvo probably rates a golden pasta award as a diet-conscious Italian widow with the table manners of a seagull when it comes to other people's plates. Gemini is the kind of play the early William Saroyan might have enjoyed or, for that matter, written...
...Rozelle Hardcastle, Warren has forged a considerable Southern heroine-beautiful, cunning, passionate and full of what the author calls "the mystic promise," which must be enjoyed "purely as an art, as an illusion, as a complex poetry of the soul and the gonads." In her middle age, a rich widow and an expatriate, Rozelle marries a swami who had been the cultural darling of her Nashville set. His attraction is that he is no swami at all, but a brilliant fraud-a Mississippi-born Negro who taught himself to compose poetry in Hindi...