Screen
Alleva, Richard
foul-mouthed, nihilistic ex-psychiatrist, a role that cries out for one of the sleazeball turns in Rip Tom's repertoire, not for Williams's unquenchable cuteness. As a sinister housekeeper, Hanna...
...The answer may be as simple as this: Branagh is the sort of director who rises or sinks to the level of his script...
...He simply coasts between the special effects...
...In the patches of dialogue with detective, comic sidekick, and heroine, Branagh, patently bored with the mere functionality of the scenes, shuttles the sidekick about the room and in and out of some of the clumsiest blocking seen outside film school...
...But it is the idea of the place in its less savory days that is central to Mee's play, to Daniel Schreier's music, to Anne Bogart's direction: the nursing home as asylum as prison as ruin...
...Mary Beth Hurt makes the wife an iron but- terfly with a secretion of poison...
...In contrast is a deadpan description by David Steinberg, crotch-high to Terence Mintern, who describes the sexual apparatus of Ethyl, a hermaphrodite...
...The combined whitenesses seem to erase the lawyer, seem to drown her in the rampant upward mobility of her friends...
...If that sounds like a bro- mide, there's nothing bromidic in the way Hicks and Campbell dramatize the idea...
...Nothing in Branagh's staging convinces me that he took anything in DeadAgain's story seriously in the way that even the most fantastic story must be taken so that it may grip the viewer...
...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE ALL THE WORLD'S A RUIN 'FOREIGN COUNTRY' & 'SHEETS' / ncreasingly one goes away from the traditional venues in search of theater...
...As the detective, Sam Shepard provokes a question: how did this most verbally exuberant of playwrights become the most taciturn of good screen actors...
...Barbara Hershey, as the heroine, is emotionally ambidextrous...
...The text is full of anecdotes, real and bogus natural history, and, alas, general statements about life that sometimes come across as comic apothegms, sometimes as platitudes...
...As a sinister housekeeper, Hanna Schygulla, the iciest vamp since Dietrich, turns mum- mylike under Branagh's direction...
...You won't like Defenseless if you feel that all good murder mysteries should take place in rural England and be solved by dotty maiden ladies who memorize train schedules...
...In fact, Dead Again comes across less like a story than a sto- ryboard...
...udged strictly as a puzzle, Defenseless (script by James Hicks, direction by Martin Campbell) surpasses Dead Again because its surprises and solutions are more startling yet more believable and don't depend on supernatural hokum...
...Largely plotless, Another Person brings to a dinner party a collection of what once would have been considered grotesques if one were talking about a Luis Bufiuel film, but are here presented as people whose physical and psychological differences from the norm (whatever that is) isolate them as we wall them off with compassion, contempt, fear, uneasiness...
...Only Derek Jacobi, as a softly menacing hypnotist, delivers a substantial performance...
...Or does the excessiveness of one make the economy of the other possible, as Hyde's ferocity spurred Jekyll on to greater benevolence...
...As with most of the audience, I suspect, my eyes kept coming back to Maria Clark, an attractive woman with expressive hands and a truncated body that dwindled into barely functional legs...
...the speech would be simply tedious if it were not an occasion for Mintern, a transvestite veteran of Charles Ludlum's company, to put aside Ethyl's initial toughness to dis- play giant vulnerability alongside the assurance of tiny Steinberg...
...If and this is the decisive if--Branagh were really the sort of baroque stylist who could convert the sow's ear of a jejune script into an exceedingly silky purse...
...the setting fascinating...
...Later, in black tank tops, they become menacing as they join the prin- cipals in images of demotic collapse that, despite Bogart's inge- nuity, provide more descent-into-chaos doings than the perfor- mance really needed...
...Later, our apprehensions are justified...
...Rates higher for Canadian and foreign subscriptions...
...His eyes narrow as he begins to realize her personal stake in the case, and we begin to feel apprehensive for the lawyer...
...11 October 1991: 581 zest that the detective, a tough customer, becomes the still center of the lawyer's storm...
...How do the two beings coexist in the same body, feed on the same temperament...
...Psychological distress had to be acted, but size, color, age were explicit in the casting...
...With the scenes of hypnotism, nightmare, seance, he is no more than competent...
...I await his next Shakespearean shipment (Othello is rumored to be in the works) with eagerness...
...The production is site specific in a physical sense, as En Garde Arts offerings always are...
...And then outlive the story...
...Having taken the murdered man's daughter to a public beach, the lawyer squirms into a bathing suit under cover of a blanket...
...In a couple of weeks, I may not be able to recount the plot of Defenseless but I'll remember the following: Wearing a white dress while visiting her lover and his wife in their deluxe house, the lawyer sits on a spotlessly white couch...
...The acting makes it work...
...The building's own story might have provided the spine for a play--as that of the Victory Theatre did last year for the En Garde Arts production of Mac Wellman's Crowbar--but Charles L. Mee, Jr., the author of Another Person Is a Foreign Country, wants to work in a 582: Commonweal different way with the Towers...
...It's a place where people went and had the door shut on them, and were cast out of the main- stream," he told New York Newsday (September 5...
...I don't think I've seen another murder mystery that depends so much on people watching people and interpreting what they see...
...How did the exciting artist of Henry V become the dogged technician of Dead Again...
...And the lawyer's understanding of this contempt helps crack the case...
...The movement from introduction of the characters through riotous destruction to rebirth (Ajax, the deaf character, dies dramatically and is brought back to life) is clear enough, but the journey is strewn with stumbling blocks as well as felic- itous passages...
...But speaking for myself, the emotional heat of this movie makes DeadAgain look like a bad case of romanticism-in-the-head...
...It makes use of the Towers' vast court- yard and the threatening interior facade: the windows, the scaf- folding that suggests fire escapes, the flight of steps that spill into the space from one corner...
...The concept was impressive...
...For most of the evening, she was carried around or sat on the table like an animated centerpiece, but at one point she had a speech about pity and how it is based on insufficient knowledge, suggesting that she might be happier than those who did not know how to respond to her presence...
...subscriptions only...
...In court, the lawyer batters a detective's testimony with such Receive 22 Issues Of The National Catholic Weekly For As tittle As $14.95 Edited by the Jesuits since 1909, AMERICA AMERICA is a weekly journal of It's Not Easy opinion published for the thoughtful Being A Manager reader interested in the Catholic And A Christian perspective...
...This is a fast-tempo perform- ance-the lawyer's feelings constantly collide or spill into each other--but Hershey never skates on the surface...
...The teen-ager simply stands and strips...
...At first, dressed as waiters, they intone, "May we serve you...
...The real power of this thriller (about a lawyer who beds down with the husband of an old Smith College class- mate only to end up defending the classmate from the charge of murdering the husband) resides in a series of dramatic moments that illuminate and advance the story...
...Her work here is furious and lucid...
...Even as he tries to respond to the cross- examination, the cop can't help noticing the stress that underlies the lawyer's frenzied joy in battle...
...Some of the performers, like Clark, were the disabilities they represented: the Lighthouse Agency Choir, for instance, blind witnesses to the action, one of whom kept reaching down to assure his dog that all was well in the turmoil around them...
...Watching the girl through the lawyer's eyes, we see that the girl's brazenness isn't a sexy come-on but an index to her contempt for her own body and, underlying that, her contempt for life itself...
...And Branagh fumbles the scenes that exist only to push the plot along...
...Orson Welles's prestidig- itation could transform the paperback hackery of The Lady from Shanghai into art, but Branagh can't pull off a comparable trick...
...I nominate Shepard the successor to Steve McQueen as Cold-Eyed Master of Minimalism, but not even McQueen was as tightly coiled as Shepard...
...She and the other characters were at once individuals and metaphors for a larger cultural and political isolation that was Mee's main theme...
...While DeadAgain is nothing but a flimsy portfolio of notions, Defenseless has a real theme to hold it together: freedom, unaccompanied by wisdom, can destroy you as surely as subservience...
...There is a large chorus which, for some reason, the program calls "Angels...
...Ajax (Bruce Hlibok) has a lovely speech (trans- lated against his wishes by one of the chorus) about how he could not hear music but could feel it in the bench, and how he came to love the piano for its beauty and its silence...
...She evidently feels what we see, panics, spills some red wine onto the carpet, moves to clean it up, looks up to recognize a hatred in the eyes of her old schoolmate that has nothing to do with spilled wine...
...The most recent En Garde Arts pro- duction took me to 106th Street and Central Park West, to that grand old derelict of a building (a designated landmark) that Charles C. Haight designed in the late 1880s as the New York Cancer Hospital...
...Later the Towers Nursing Home, it was closed in a cloud of scandal in the 1970s and it has been increasingly at the mercy of vandals...
...He's not a wizard who can turn lead to gold but a faithful artistic courier who delivers the gold intact...
...Featured regularly are ~ Evolvingincisive articles on contemporary theology and current events, lively film and book reviews as well as special theme editions that provide Name Address City State Zip SA 2502 Offer valid for new U.S...
...And this hatred helps march the movie to its denouement...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 17
