Five Finger Exercise

A girl named Annette Gorman plays the daughter. Miss Wood has a tiny role of one of the two girls on the beach in a few insignificant scenes. Sadly most of the punch of the original play about an English family is left at as some of the other reviews imply. It is a strange mishmash to have a British father and an American mother as they keep trying to explain to us the audience. Shoulda stuck with the original British family but it was produced by the husband of Miss Russell and so she being very American they changed it to a great disadvantage to suit her. Still Miss Russell is a formidable talent and does everything she can to make it an Oscar winning performance in my opinion, that elusive statute that she never did win though two or three nominations. This was not one of them though.

An interesting flick, if not a great one, based on a play by Peter Shaffer. I can't quite grasp the meaning of the title, which refers to a piano playing exercise. A bourgeois family finds itself going through some contortions following the arrival of a nice young tutor from Germany, who moves in with them. The woman of the house, whose love of culture and the finer things is not shared by her husband, is drawn to him, and he begins a love/hate friendship with their bright but troubled son. Things get a little melodramatic towards the end (not surprisingly), but the fine cast makes things work. The character of Philip, who is played perfectly by Richard Beymer, was the outstanding feature.

Whether "Five Finger Exercise" is a good or bad movie, it is a very painful film to watch...the type I generally avoid. But it stars some terrific actors...so I watched it.

Why do I sat it's painful? Well, seeing a film where a couple hates each other and you see and hear such venom isn't exactly a fun picture to watch! I also dislike similar stories such as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" or the TV show "Mama's Family"... as it's painful to see people being so ugly towards each other. I just would rather watch something that isn't so ugly and depressing.

The Harrington family is very well off. After all, they spend their summers in a cottage in Carmel*...a very upscale town. But despite money, the family is in crisis. Mr. And Mrs. Harrington (Jack Hawkins and Rosalind Russell) are a very mismatched couple. He likes sports and being a guy...with few pretenses. She likes being pretentious and putting on airs and smothering their son. Naturally, this is not a good fit and there is tension in the house. But they also have grown or mostly grown kids and they, too, become part of this toxic environment. To make things more complicated, a handsome young tutor (Maximillian Schell) is living with them...and he seems to be pulled into the middle of this mess.

Although I disliked the story, it was mostly well made. I thought the Oedipal tension was very interesting with the son. But I also thought that Russell's character was a bit too much and making her awfulness more subtle would have helped the story. As is, she's a caricature. It also seems to make you feel sorry for the husband, though he is a part of the problem as well. Toning down her character would have helped the husband to be more noticably dysfunctional. Overall, a reasonably well made but unpleasant film.

*To give you an idea about the money needed to live there, today a round of golf in Pebble Beach including all fees is about $1000 per person! And, Mr. Harrington loves to play golf!

What a terrible shame that this film of Peter Shaffer's amazing play was turned into an uneventful melodrama. The amazing dynamics of the five character's interaction on-stage, has been reduced in the film to a domestic, "kitchen sink" drama. Perhaps the close of the Second World War was too close at hand for the film maker and the studio to really trust the power of the play and the horrors of the Nazi Germany. The English family is American in the film, which takes most of the punch from the drama, and the erotic undercurrents of the mother /son relationship pitched against the German tutor, Walter have been set aside. With the raw emotional core of the drama removed, what sadly remains is a stereotypical, Hollywood drama with little true emotion and a film that sadly serves the startling brilliance of the play.

Society wife and mother on a summer estate in Northern California grimaces at her "uncivilized" husband's behavior while adoring their houseguest, a handsome German tutor to their young daughter. Unconvincing transcription of Peter Shaffer's play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett gives Rosalind Russell lots of fluttery, theatrical bits of business in the lead. Her pseudo-cultured Louise Harrington is nervously, desperately gay--but she's not a hoot, like Auntie Mame (though the two share some similar qualities). Louise puts on airs only so her vulgar husband (who never made it out of grammar school) can tear her down--and once the audience perceives that our poor, delusional heroine can only find personal happiness by facing hard reality, the rest becomes window dressing. ** from ****