Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cukor stages the story well enough against lush Welsh landscapes, but there are very few openings for his usual flourishes of wit and romance. James Costigan's mechanical teleplay often italicizes plot developments; a second-half plot stratagem, in which Morgan fathers an illegitimate baby, comes across as crude turn-of-the-century melodrama. One also wonders why Costigan has not bothered to open up the play's naturally constricted action. When Morgan travels up to Oxford to take his exams, the audience expects to go with him: the Welsh boy's first encounter with upper-crust...
...Claudius to Washington: Behind Closed Doors. There are too many scenes of cooking, cleaning and dusting, not to mention list less chitchat in underlit rooms. ("Lord have mercy, I forgot to trim the President's other sideburn," says a White House barber in a typical example of Backstairs wit.) Only a sketchy attempt is made to re-create the nation's capital during the periods covered by the story. The one continuing dramatic conflict derives from the cardboard characterization of a mildly officious real-life housekeeper, Mrs. Jaffray (Cloris Leachman). Other wise, the show's major dramatic...
...Coup, the product of this new perspective, is quite simply a marvelous book. The tale of a coup in the mythical sub-Saharan dictatorship of Kush--"a constitutional monarchy with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed"--becomes for Updike the vehicle of a biting, driving wit, a brilliant farce that together lambastes America, the Soviet Union, radicals, bureaucrats, poets, capitalists and, of course, lovers. Being Updike, the author retains enough of his obsession with bedroom mores and manners to fill the book with ruminations of love and lust, the foibles of marriage and the freedom of adultery--but happily...
After exchanging some worn New York vs. Los Angeles one-liners, far inferior to Woody Allen's in Annie Hall, Fonda and Alda get all bittersweet. The heroine's lacerating wit, it turns out, is but a mask for her insecurity. The superficial writing is not helped by Alda's unprepossessing screen presence, Ross's melodramatic use of closeups, or by a gratuitous beach scene that exists only to show off Fonda in a bikini...
...actress who arrives in Beverly Hills for Oscar night. Alternately buoyant and defeated, youthful and aging, she transforms a potentially campy character into a woman of great complexity and beauty. As her loving husband, an antiques dealer who prefers sex with men, Caine sets off Smith's brittle wit with soothing tenderness. Together these actors prove that a marriage of convenience can be a dynamic emotional affair. They also demonstrate that Simon, when he puts his mind to it, can be a worthy American heir to Noël Coward...