Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
Baptist in Amarillo] challenged the right-wing candidate for York - strangely enough, I mingle and make friends with the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was the people...
...There was no other way I could have been Partly this results from changes made in Mark Medoff's convinced...
...MOJTABAI: Well, first of all I felt I couldn't . understand Amarillo unless I were there on a day-to-day basis and satu- ADAPTATION LOSS rated, steeped in daily life...
...memorized from-the 1960s...
...It just doesn't to embody frustration...
...I opened my door a crack and everything blew in...
...So I gets generated, especially in one scene of angry lovemaking know people and they know me...
...I do care about the community...
...It is a English audiences, and they were performed by stars like murder farce, a mixture of mayhem, slapstick, and gentility, a Jessie Matthews, Jack Hulbert,,and Cicely Courtneidge, who genre more popular forty years ago than it is now...
...I didn't have to make up projects for play require a strong, rich story, and it is unfortunate that myself...
...Moreover, wherever I was, I could start talking casu- Medoff succumbed to pressures to simplify his, which has ally and learn something...
...It's not restful, but I congregation...
...The only 26 September 1986: 501...
...Unfortu- and chance discoveries complicated enough to suggest that nately, Children of a Lesser God often crosses both lines...
...And I don't want to rest...
...Somehow that friction and homecoming when he lost...
...Hurt's love of Bach was in 1937...
...Not in egoism is introduced, but never explored, so that he comes a little pocket as one often is in New York or Cambridge...
...Hurt's can also be out in the world - with others and for them...
...I have a lot of friends there...
...But the water imagery is over- final curtain is not sustained by complexities of plot and done, especially in a stupid scene where Hurt "descends" into character (there are none), but by amiable tunes, likable dancher pool...
...I Directed by Randa Haines, whose television experience went all over Amarillo asking people, "Why do you have such includes Hill Street Blues and the film about incest, fences...
...Leaning on a Lamppost" as though he had just taken a crash course in Fred Astaire's sentimental wryness...
...Armitage and his associates are candidates for a new edition of TOM O'BRIEN The Scholar Adventurers, should Richard D. Altick have one in mind...
...lowest-common-denominator plot, reduced list of characters, and pro forma happy end...
...I find that I can still name most 1938, one of a rather odd collection of popular songs he did on of the cast of the road company I saw in Indianapolis, in which the Brunswick label, and - in an even greater cultural leap - Erich von Stroheim played the wicked Jonathan Brewster and I learned to do the Lambeth Walk so that I could be up-to-date the Boris Karloff lines were rewritten to refer to the new star...
...For one thing, it is handsomely done - amusing sets that win applause every time they change shape or direction, colorful AT THE END of the first act of Me and My Girl, Bill period constumes, a good American company to back up the Snibson, the newly discovered Earl of Hareford, de- talented English star...
...It play - changes which he presumably approved as cowas that simple...
...I went back for his liefs are very different from mine...
...dialogue simplified, Living there, I knew what required deep probing and what was scenes added, etc...
...The ugly ducklings, who are not remotely imagery is deepened, poetically, with some beautiful scenes of ugly to begin with, turn into swans by the end of the show, and Martin's nude swimming...
...And then there are those fences, very tight...
...The revival was an immediate success in London, where it is still playing, presumably because it tapped the ME & MY REVIVAL nostalgia market, but how can American audiences be nostalgic for a kind of show that ngver played here...
...felt it was important to say, I'm here...
...and his attempt to teach some of his students rock music Richard Armitage, Noel Gay's son, decided that the 1980s through rhythmic vibrations are deftly exploited...
...how the show was re-created, stories of determined research There is also a line between adaptation and dilution...
...What was that Screen about...
...his career as a silent-film comedian had been almost forgotten...
...It was a necessary move - simply been adapted, not into a film, but into television film, with a from the standpoint of the book I wanted to write...
...Anyone coming fresh to the show from the nothing to say about class distinctions and social pretensions...
...He was the people whose occupations, religious beliefs, and political bemore moderate conservative candidate...
...Well, the pain of their "dialogue" through sign language...
...But there, though it's a city, it's a small town...
...Of course, what works as a play doesn't always Certain matters could only be clarified by being there...
...In across as too pure a hero...
...They all sang "Sweet, Sweet Spirit...
...I love the Oscar-winning role in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Hurt took a landscape...
...screenwriter...
...They would give me answers and I wouldn't believe Something About Amelia, Children provides a bare-bones them...
...As with his on...
...where she vehemently overwhelms him...
...She also uses her thick black boots for punctuation and mean here I could theoretically, but I don't...
...I its prototype, The Miracle Worker...
...So it is in revival...
...the suggestion is even made that she the resident swans pick up a number of duckling virtues on the has developed other, extraordinarily sensuous capacities as way...
...Between her and Hurt some real heat happen...
...After way, a show like'Me and My Girl, which is amusing, spirited, all, there are direct references to works that came long after and undemanding, is sure to find its audience...
...Martin has remarkably severe black and white coloring, and taut, expressive cheekMoJrABAI: Yes, I cross boundaries more easily in Amarillo...
...to keep the wind out...
...So it Also uneven is Haines's use of music...
...Of course, the result is not really a re-creation since Stage the book, as I indicated above, has post-100s allusions, and a number of Gay songs from other shows have been added to Me and My Girl...
...They are privacy fences, I thought...
...But Haines minute I moved to Amarillo and became a home-renter - not a makes their love stand too much alone, leaving a thin feel...
...A play has to be opened up...
...That's why I'm staying Hurt and Martin make the film worth seeing...
...Martin can rely on no more than Amarillo - though you don't have the variety of attitudes, petulant perfectionism (or as she explains in sign language, "I ethnic groups, and religious groups you would have in New won't do anything I don't do well") to explain her refusal to Commonweal: 500 vocalize...
...ing, and an abundance of occasions for physical comedy...
...As a result, it lacks the ambition, BUT THEN, why stay there after the book is written...
...Nevertheless, both stage play and screensimply a fact of life...
...I can be very inward there...
...with deaf students, when he tries to coax them from negativism Not the same kind of friends I used to have in New York or via an idealism that Hurt, both by age and look, seems to have Cambridge - occupationally alike or like-minded...
...It seems silly to me now, but I spent more time on this "problem...
...Save us...
...Joseph Kesselring's play opened early in 1941, but, despite a Never one of the Noel Coward-Bea Lillie-Gertrude Law- few references to Hitler and the war in Europe, in has no more rence transatlanticians, Noel Gay wrote English musicals for to do with that year than Me and My Girl does with 1937...
...Still, it looks a ROASTING OLD CHESTNUTS likely candidate for Broadway success for two reasons...
...Baptist in Amarillo] challenged the right-wing candidate for York - strangely enough, I mingle and make friends with the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention...
...For instance, for a long time it was MINOR MIRACLE WORKER a puzzle to me that the houses were built close together...
...Duke Ellington recorded it in early experiences as a playgoer...
...But the script was the proper decade for a return of his father's most successis over-heavy with rock songs and teenage behavior...
...Because here you have all those teacher (William Hurt) determined to get her to speak...
...The home-owner - I realized that those fences are necessary just movie never delivers what it promises...
...He is at his best in classroom scenes certain way which is congenial...
...Unlike Pygmalion or even My Fair Lady, it has that goes with it...
...Some strong minor characters, like the school prin- seldom appeared on the Broadway stage and with minimal cipal (Phillip Bosco) and Martin's mother (Piper Laurie), are success when they did...
...The happy ending is de rigueur, but the journey to the compensation for deafness...
...A number of newspapers have carried accounts of line between appealing to adolescents and pandering to them...
...Their close-knit houses - as if they wanted to be close to each other romance is compelling, especially because of the verve and - and yet they're divided sharply by those fences...
...He was very well received by his that mingling are very important to me...
...Since I am as 1937, when Me and My Girl was first produced in London - susceptible to stylish triviality as the next high-minded critic, I particularly to My Fair Lady - and Robert Lindsay sings can only wish it well...
...At It is a standard tale of cultural dislocation (cf., Ruggles of Red first her touch is light, with mood scenes showing Hurt's trip Gap) in which the joke lies in the juxtaposition of two stanby ferry to the peninsula where the school is located...
...Me and My Girl was produced by and also left undeveloped, as though Haines had to hold the story to starred Lupino Lane, a fixture of English musicals long after a strict diet of characterization...
...A second thing in the show's favor is that it is not at all alike, is drawn in by the infectious song and the strut-dance serious...
...He does so with such tion, a nice combinationof boyish charm and knockabout comenthusiasm that everyone on stage, Cockney and aristocrat edy...
...there are no CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD both moves and disappoints...
...He also has a hard task to master: since Marlee Martin won't speak, he has to interpret her rapid TooLAN: So concretely, it's more ecumenical or pluralistic for (often tempestuous) sign language in a deadpan fashion to you than New York or Cambridge...
...Lindsay, whose credits are more classiclares his allegiance to his Cockney upbringing by cal than acrobatic, is rubber-jointed in the Lupino Lane tradidemonstrating "The Lambeth Walk...
...There is a ful musical...
...It was one of the few songs by Noel Gay to become - a bonafide American artifact - awakened memories of my popular in the United States...
...I bones...
...I thought there was something deeper at work here, and story about an angry young deaf woman (Marlee Martin) and a devious, even demonic...
...with the dancing crowd at Connersville (Indiana) Junior High...
...But when I don't want to be inward and feel I shouldn't be, I But they are limited by the thinness of the plot...
...work as film...
...chinks between the slats...
...I wanted rawness, and hard-earned optimism not just of its source, but to be there when the book came out, and not run away...
...TOOLAN: But what brought you to move there...
...joined in this time, holding hands...
...Yet, "The F Me and My Girl set my junior-high dancing feet atingle, Lambeth Walk" was already crossing cultural lines in its I the other current Broadway revival, Arsenic and Old Lace heyday...
...I like it...
...The place has made it possible for me to live in a pay cut to make this film...
...current musical theater might see the number as a borrowing These days, when seriousness is hardly a requisite on Broadfrom "The Best of Times" scene in La Cage auxFolles...
...Moreover, Haines uses landscape symbolism unevenly...
...The water dards of behavior...
...avoid stealing any of her thunder...
Vol. 113 • September 1986 • No. 16
