Hard to concentrate on the movie...
...because of Natalie Wood. She never looked better than in this movie.
shareThat's very true. I think she looks a little too good in this movie – especially when you look at her mother.
shareYeah, but you have to take into consideration that Alva was about twenty and "Mama".. well, she was just turning forty-three... and if the old lady had her way with young Alva the way she wanted to then Alva could have possibly looked like Mama twenty-plus years hence dot dot dot
Anyway tho, Kate Reid is wonderful! She was wonderful in everything.
The birthday party was written in to this play. I guess the writers figured that they'd like to show the results of what thirty years of whorin' could do to a woman. This film actually has a great potential to it and should be re-made but since it bombed at the box office and the critics hated it and Hollywood ain't keen on re-making films that originally bombed and were panned by the critics this movie won't get re-made but it should be! And shot as a period piece too. I hate it when they modernize stuff. I just had a vision of Anna Paquin in the Alva role so maybe they should just leave it lay.
There aren't many films, good or bad (this one's somewhere in the middle), that I want to see remade – and this film is no exception. I agree that Kate Reid is a delight in this film and in all her roles, and we could use more actresses who aren't afraid to look, um, "earthy" and give it their all for a role that speaks to how we live, for better or worse.
Interestingly (at least to me), I just watched a very young Natalie Wood in "The Star" from 1952, playing Bette Davis' daughter. It's a thinly veiled telling of the Joan Crawford story, and by that measure it's much better than "Mommie Dearest" – and probably more believable as well. Natalie's impossibly gorgeous but almost unrecognizable as a teenager.