Word: abely
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CACTUS FLOWER. Adapter-Director Abe Burrows gives a fast spin to a French sex farce that sets a reluctantly spinsterish nurse, a determined roué of a dentist, and his beatnik mistress in a romantic whirl. Lauren Bacall is appropriately prickly as a late-blooming lovely...
CACTUS FLOWER is a French farce seasoned to U.S. tastes by Adapter-Director Abe Burrows and served with unerring timing by a well-chosen cast. Lauren Bacall is drolly dry as a spinsterish nurse with a voice that would intimidate gangrene, and Barry Nelson is convincingly mock-innocent as a dentist with a master's degree in bachelorhood...
...appealing to the "average person's" prurient interest. "They appeal to the elderly, the impotent and the perverse. Must one be judged by what offends others?" Indeed, can books that actually bore the average person be adjudged obscene because they rouse the prurient interest of what Justice Abe Fortas delicately called "special groups...
Cactus Flower is such a French farce, seasoned to U.S. tastes with local situation gags by Adapter-Director Abe Burrows, garnished with appealing humanity, and served with unerring timing by a well-chosen cast. Lauren Bacall plays a dentist's nurse who looks "like a big white Band-Aid," speaks with an antiseptic voice that would intimidate gangrene, and lives a prim life with mother. The dentist (Barry Nelson) holds a master's degree in bachelorhood, and while he appreciates spinsterish efficiency in the office, he turns for amour to a Greenwich Village post-adolescent (Brenda Vaccaro). This...
...vastly accomplished jokesmith, Abe Burrows is up against tough and lonely competition-himself-and there are some cavities in his comic lines. But the cast fills them handsomely. Besides looking good, Lauren Bacall handles dialogue like a bone-dry martini. Barry Nelson's whole being winces with boyish mock innocence, and Brenda Vaccaro's characterization draws royal flushes from mental blanks...