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"What was we talking about in the first place?" "About peculiar things." The fulminating backwater tomboy, Julie Harris like a midpoint between Mary Martin and Amanda Plummer, "the sharpest set of human bones I ever felt." Scrawny, pixie-cropped, logorrheic, "an unjoined person," no more excruciating place for her than the edge of adolescence. The Beautiful People are the neighborhood princesses who won't allow her into their clubhouse, and the soldier brother (Arthur Franz) and his bride (Nancy Gates) she hopes to join out of town. Her misfit circle consists of the one-eyed cook (Ethel Waters), who plays Willendorf Venus to her Giacometti tangle, and the towheaded satellite of her tiny cousin (Brandon deWilde). "I feel the world going around very fast, I feel it turning and it makes me dizzy." "Turn the other way." Carson McCullers' self-portrait of the artist as "president of the leftover people," set in a Kazanesque Deep South warmed over by Fred Zinnemann. A summer weekend around a kitchen table, the proper proscenium for the gawky heroine to turn verbal cartwheels: "I feel like somebody's peeled all the skin off me!" Her agonized awkwardness contrasts with the housekeeper's chuckling serenity, an earthy jollity briefly cracked to reveal her own romantic pain as Waters floods a close-up with dolorous grace. (Her other mighty moment envisions her as a plush lifebuoy to which the runty castaways cling, huddled with a hymn in the void.) The dream world is a honeymoon car from which the lass is dragged screaming, the nightmare world is a shadowy zone of grabby men, nothing left to do but venture into the real world. "As the irony of fate would have it..." Preminger astringently literalizes these growing pains in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. With James Edwards, William Hansen, and Dickie Moore. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |