Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Looking like four errant Blue Boys, the lads hit their nimble stride in a script shrewdly slapped together by Scenarist Alun Owen and directed in racy "new cinema" style by Richard Lester. Scorning plot, Night affects to study an ordinary day or so in the wholly extraordinary lives of its heroes. They are the clear-eyed innocents, imprisoned by fame behind a whimsically improbable wall of wailing nymphets, but never for a moment blinded to the really flagrant foolishness of the adult world around them. Representing the dangers of creeping maturity is a low-comedy menace identified as Paul...
...girls "with skin as white as cream." Or, as in 'Colorful," he stands smirking with his hands poised effeminately and spits out in a jazzy, mocking voice, "As the Duchess of Windsor might say, Black is me." The sheer force of Davis's personality hides his and the script's failure to create a complete character...
...there's a send-'em-home-happy ending, but otherwise the script is admirably loyal to the play. It sets the same scene: a rundown resort hotel in Mexico. It presents the same persons: the rampant tramp (Ava Gardner) who keeps the hotel for business and a couple of beach boys for pleasure; a renegade reverend (Richard Burton) expelled from his parish in Virginia for rutting in the rectory; a roundheeled teen-ager (Sue Lyon) who wishes she had been there; a peripatetic painter (Deborah Kerr) who sketches for her supper...
...script tells the same story the play told, though it isn't much of a story. The characters for the most part simply talk on the terrace, and as they talk they reveal and heal themselves. Fascinating, sometimes. But sometimes rather tiresomely reminiscent of group therapy-especially when Analyst Williams, who has become a bit sententious in middle age, clears his throat and weighs in with a brave banality: "A home is something two people have between them. Any light is a good light...
David Wheeler, who directed both productions, has wisely treated Albee's script as lightly as he can. He has ignored as much as possible the overly-Freudian and rather tedious general indictment of the family and emphasized the destructively funny--and best--portions of the play. He seems to have lavished particular care on the many short caricatures of individual features of American family life, a fact which goes a long way toward explaining the success of the present production...