Word: jessica
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body stockings hoof it up to songs with lyrics about death. A hospital fantasy sequence looks at once like an elaborate antismoking commercial, a parody of Fellini...
Even before the opening credits, Jessica (Bergen) has kicked hubby Phil Potter out of their New York apartment and begun to sing. She sings like a gelded Al Jolson. Potter, a writer, ("my stuff is in those airplane magazines right behind the barf bags") escapes to Cambridge. Potter is believable, if wimpy, when he sits in the shadows of his bachelor pad and listens to "The Way We Were." At his brother's urging, he joins a divorced-men's therapy group where one ex-husband plans to marry the same woman for the fourth time and another dreams...
Predictably, Jessica reappears, dressed to seduce the Ayatollah. On the brink of luring Potter into her motel-room sack, she sings again--a cockroach doing Donna Summer. But bitchy glamour appeals to Potter; he wants to try life with Jessica again. In a bizarre scene meant to symbolize his anxiety about leaving Marilyn, Potter hyperventilates on a Bloomingdale's couch. This sequence seems to perplex Reynolds most of all. He looks lost portraying a character who has no control of his emotions...
Swearing to Marilyn that he will never again visit her. Potter heads back to Jessica's Halston bedroom and Zabar-stocked kitchen. A memorable camera shot pans their connubial bed as they make alex-comfort love while Candice chirps again--a disco duck on quaaludes. By now, the unhappy marriage of her voice and Marvin Hamlisch's music no longer amuses; it sickens--both us and Potter...
SASC is also trying to make people aware that the fight against apartheid in this country is not restricted to college campuses. "This is the last day of the National Week of Action Against Apartheid," Jessica S. Banthin '81, another organizer, said. "We are going to focus on the fact that this is a national movement," she added...