Word: woman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...high-minded exercise in old-school TV sentimentality-a sort of Teacher Knows Best. Houseman plays a legendary professor whose stony exterior belies a heart as big as a lecture hall. He is surrounded by a bevy of students (one farm boy, one city slicker, one feisty woman) who try to curry his favor and share his wisdom. Since the first episode recounts virtually the entire plot of the movie, The Paper Chase may have nowhere else to go except oblivion. CBS has put it opposite ABC'S killer hits, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and that...
Mercouri plays a fading film star who returns to her native Greece to appear in Medea and also in a TV film about her preparation for the role. As a publicity stunt she arranges to visit, in jail, an American woman (Ellen Burstyn) who, like Medea, has committed infanticide. What with a demanding rehearsal schedule and the raging and pouting she inflicts on her director and her entourage, you would think the Mercouri character would have no time left to feel guilty about exploiting the half-mad murderess, but she does. Repeatedly she goes back into the prison...
Burstyn's understated performance as a simple, Bible-spouting woman driven crazy by her husband's philandering is the movie's single redeeming feature. Otherwise there is nothing emotionally or intellectually involving here. Unless, of course, one is interested in some "personal statements" about the state of the movie business, contemporary issues and the star and director themselves that they manage to tuck in along the way. It perhaps need not be added that these are of a piece with the rest of A Dream of Passion-awkward, pretentious and empty...
...WOMAN AT HER WINDOW...
...woman is the bored and elegant wife of a witty, philandering Italian diplomat stationed in Greece in 1936, when, as people used to say, the war clouds were gathering. What she sees from her window is a Communist on the run from a police roundup ordered by a new fascist dictatorship. What happens after he climbs through the window is that love conquers the class barriers and she devises an elaborate stratagem to help him escape the country. Later, we are given to understand, she joins him and they both become martyrs to his cause after World War II begins...