Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Moreau hates the cold, so she decided to do a ski-fashion layout as a photographic comic book, shot in a studio. She commissioned Playwright Françoise Dorin to write the scenario and got Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and Actress Nathalie Delon (Alain's ex) to ham it up while modeling the necessary ski clothes. To caption 21 displays of Christmas-gift ideas, Moreau wrote poetry, which is reproduced in her own handwriting and reveals a whimsical side of the serious seductress...
...entire world turned into a bleak desert of melancholy, Neil Simon would be an oasis of laughter. His eye for the wryly amusing incongruities of life, his zingy one-line gag-ripostes, his ardently skilled desire to be entertaining-all these have made him the leading U.S. comic playwright for more than a decade. But like the clown with the yen to play Hamlet, Simon has had the urge, and been critically urged, to try his hand at more serious drama. The result is The Gingerbread Lady, a schizoid play in which the dramatist is so busy applying plasters...
...MARTIN RITT hasn't transformed the dross of The Great White Hope into a good film, at least his jumbling of theatrical convention and film cliche makes it fairly easy to watch. Despite playwright Howard Sackler's screenplay, and his play's prime standing as a Kultcha classic, Ritt hasn't stooped to the traditional homage Hollywood usually pays to Broadway hit-dom. The Great White Hope is severely divided, but many of the tensions the black actors manage to convey are true. At certain points-particularly when the splendid Moses Gunn, as an anachronistic black nationalist street preacher, accosts...
Given the historical context, it may seem nigh impossible to overstate the repressive prejudices of Johnson's time. However, that is precisely what Sackler has done. Most of Johnson's personality has been removed from the playwright's Jack Jefferson, making him more defenseless and unblemished than Johnson's staunchest supporters ever claimed. Sackler's character has none of Johnson's sensual excesses (and only one all-suffering white wife, drearily enacted by Jane Alexander). The ironic sense of his own destiny which allowed Johnson to cheat and compromise his way to personal security is switched to Jefferson's stereotyped...
...corrupted when he wrote that line, having lost his Depression radicalism somewhere between World War II and Hollywood. Sackler, however, tries to effect that which he never possessed; and Ritt, himself far removed from his honest work, Edge of the City and Hud, cannot cover for him. The Jewish playwright is no longer in a position to voice radical ethos convincingly. That may be the real tragedy behind The Great White Hope...