Word: zindel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, the film directed by Paul Newman adapted from Paul Zindel's play, takes a typically fifties subject--a middle-aged widow trapped in a ghetto of emotional frustration--and dresses it up in typically fifties sentiment. The movie is a plea for the Blanche du Bois and Amandas of the world, victims of rat-racing commercial America. The American Theater has wallowed under a deluge of such stuff for 20 years; the dialogue sounds like a rerun William Inge or Tennessee Williams, and the movie watches like a Blue Monday...
...PROBLEM with the movie is that it belabors Beatrice's misery without explaining it. Hers is the same struggle as Willie Loman's, but Zindel writes as if he were too cool to identify the cultural forces Miller unveiled. Zindel's tottering steps toward social analysis stop at a symbolism laid on so thick that it is embarassing. Take, for instance, Mathilde's fascination with radioactive half-life, the dominant metaphor for Beatrice's disintegration; or Beatrice's boarder, a vegetable corpse of a woman, with palsied hands, lips curled in like a death grip, and big blind eyes that...
Directed by IRVIN KERSHNER Screenplay by PAUL ZINDEL...
...EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS. Adapted from Paul Zindel's 1971 Pulitzer-prizewinning play, this saga of a bitchy, boozy mother and the two daughters she victimizes is sentimental without really being tender, naturalistic without being real. The elder daughter (Roberta Wallach), a callipygous, gum-snapping high school cheerleader, suffers from epileptic seizures-presumably a result of life with mother. The younger, ethereal offspring (Nell Potts) escapes into the world of scientific research. She wins a prize for a school experiment concerning the supposed deleterious effects of gamma rays on sensitive marigolds: some survive...
...heart or the cruelty of others, the kind of being warped by fate that we find compassionately rendered in the plays of Tennessee Williams. In The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds and to a lesser extent in And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Paul Zindel aroused the hope that he might be a playwright in the Williams mode, one who could cast a kindly light in the dark corners of twisted souls. That is precisely the hope dashed by his latest play, The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild. Here he is simply huckstering kookdom...