Word: garbo
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...soft spots, but it does allow Stone to adopt a white-trash Southern cadence and wear a persuasive dust-bowl scowl. In stir she sits and stares, her old sexual insolence tamped into sadness and contempt. She looks haggard, wiry, prickly--fabulous. By the end she is practically Garbo in Camille, the doomed woman comforting the gentle, lesser man who loves her. Stone does a fine job without surrendering her star quality. She just can't save this schematic story...
...more focus by making sure the early events, including the rhinoceros, resonate throughout the film. He also gives James (winningly played by Paul Terry) a mission: to find his dream city, a Deco-delicious Manhattan. Spider (voiced by Susan Sarandon) here has the melancholy hauteur of a Garbo femme fatale; and the Centipede, obnoxious in the book, is now a Leo Gorcey type (voiced by Richard Dreyfuss), who gets a shot at redemption by fighting a shipful of skeleton pirates straight out of Ray Harryhausen's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad...
...more like a president than a monarch, and is reminiscent of the well-loved but invalid FDR. Costuming by Holly Maples (a B.U. student) also lends a hand to creating the atmosphere of America 50 years ago: for the wealthy ladies, dresses you'd expect to see on Greta Garbo; for the less affluent girls, simpler, plainer dresses suitable for Betty Crocker. The most charming detail is the plaid suitcases that were the rage in the 1940s, carried by characters costumed as traveling salespeople...
Briefly, in the early '30s, gays were familiar screen types: "pansies" (often played by Franklin Pangborn) for comic relief and, more heroically, bisexual heroines (incarnated by Garbo and Dietrich) who looked thrillingly glamorous in their tuxedos and bachelor togs. That was old Hollywood's highest compliment to a woman--that she acted and thought like a man--just as new Hollywood accepts films with transvestites, men who act and think like women. In the '50s, gayness could be viewed as a social disease (in Tea and Sympathy) or with oblique rapture (in the torrid gaze of Stephen Boyd's Messala...
...runs for office, by the ebbing of his empire--would be Welles' too. And there were the famous liaisons with actresses: Welles wed three, Hearst one. For decades, while his papers denounced Hollywood morals, the old man lived openly with Davies, a comedian he foolishly tried to remake as Garbo. She stayed with him, good times and bad, in San Simeon (the "Xanadu" of Kane), his Spanish-Moorish-Italian "ranch" crammed with four millenniums' worth of trophies. It was your crazy uncle's attic, half the size of Rhode Island...