bkoganbing Five Finger Exercise ran on Broadway for the 1959-60 season for 337 performances and starred Roland Culver and Jessica Tandy. As it was produced by Fredrick Brisson on Broadway you knew that it would be for Rosalind Russell his wife if she wanted to do it. And apparently she did.Of course having a British story with one of the leads American you had to make even more adjustments than normally to transfer a one set play to the screen. Instead of a nice English country estate the setting is the Pacific coast. Hawkins is an orphan immigrant who from the United Kingdom and became a millionaire. Part of the problem though is that he's not only British but a total Philistine who sneers at all the culture is wife tries to provide son Richard Beymer and daughter Annette Gorman. A Harvard education for Beymer and a tutor for Gorman so she can go to a nice finishing school. They've taken on a tutor in Maximilian Schell.Russell came from a family where the father was a learned professor who was also a compulsive gambler and the family was on the edge of poverty.Essentially Russell and Hawkins come from two different places with entirely different sets of values. There is an permanent conflict in their relationship and Schell boarding with the family with his issues about having an unreconstructed Nazi for a father and a totally submissive mother just brings everything to a boil.I think the work should have been either all British or all American. The worst scene in the film was Hawkins listening to an American baseball game between Cincinnati and San Francisco. I listened and heard no familiar names in the commentary of the game. You'd think the authors would have used real Reds and Giants player names of the time. Hawkins looked like he didn't know what was happening. He probably would have been right at home listening to an English cricket or soccer match.Imagine if Jessica Tandy had done the film. That would have had her co-starring with her former husband. Well it worked for Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck in Night Walker.This study of a dysfunctional family and its dysfunctional tutor would have worked better in its original British setting.

mark.waltz If "The Lizard of Roz" reputation for Frederick Brisson ever needed any more evidence, then look no further than a scene where Rosalind Russell visits a music store in this film version of the hit Broadway play by Peter Shaffer. In the background, clearly visible, is the movie soundtrack for "Auntie Mame", Roz's drawing and name obvious. The fact that she's in a grayish blonde wig makes no difference. She's still the tall, statuesque matron, even if her character is closer to the Upsons than Mame Dennis. In a sense, she's also closer to the Joan Crawford variation of Harriet Craig, the cold society matron who only wanted a perfect house and home, dominating her husband, and in her case here, her two children.Louise Harrington (a soap opera name if I've ever heard one) is charming on the outside, but inside where it counts is absolutely miserable. She's desperately lonely, calculating, grasping and controlling, living a loveless marriage with furniture company owner husband Jack Hawkins. Her son (Richard Beymer) is visiting from Harvard, and her teenaged daughter (Annette Gorman) is undergoing adolescent issues even though she seems to be the most normal in the family. Roz is consumed with everything European and old style charm, and has employed a tutor (an excellent Maximillian Schell) for Gorman. Beymer is instantly suspicious of Schell, and as he observes the relationship between his parents, he realizes that the family is undergoing a psychological hell that mom seems to be clearly responsible for.Husband and wife seem to really have nothing in common. He's a typical guy, interested not in the cultural aspirations of his totally pretentious wife, and determined to have a typical father/son relationship with Beymer who is clearly undergoing problems from this latest visit home. The problem with Beymer's performance is that he is trying too hard to be an actor here rather than the character, and at times, his performance is totally forced. Someone like either Warren Beatty or Beymer's "West Side Story" co-star Russ Tamblyn would have been a more ideal choice for that part. Beymer consistently received bad reviews for his performances, and while he's certainly the right age, handsome and distinguished, he is totally lost amongst the professional looking Russell, Hawkins and Schell. When Hawkins accuses Russell of turning their son into a mama's boy, the opening is there to make it appear that Beymer's character might be gay, and indeed, there is never any reference to any women in his life other than his mother and sister.At times, too, there are looks between Beymer and Schell which appear that there might be some sexual energy between them. Schell's character is obviously obsessed with the family, confiding the truth about his own clan from Germany to Beymer. When he makes his feelings towards Russell known, the indication is there that he too has his own psychological issues and that he is reaching out to find love wherever he can. When Schell tries to console an obviously intoxicated Beymer, it is clear that the magnetism between them is more than Russell's belief that her son is simply jealous of him. Another scene between Beymer and Hawkins gives a dynamic to the family's decay, with Hawkins unable to get Beymer to open up to him about anything other than his having found his mother and the handsome professor in a compromising position. When Russell indicates that her son is jealous, it's not because of the attention that Schell gives her, it is more the fact that he wants the attention. Of course, this is never verbally brought out into the open, so any hints of a gay subtext can only be called speculation.Mixed moods and black and white photography (clearly calling for color) are other issues with this film, although the black and white photography can be construed as a metaphor for the character's colorless lives. Russell is certainly commanding, but her character's sudden changes from happy to harpy to harried make her difficult to accept and believe in. Annette Gorman does her best with a rather underdeveloped character, but a scene where she has a breakdown after a beach scene adds only more confusion to character details not expressed other than to give this character something more to do than comment on the fact that she realizes that her parents really hate each other. The final sequences never really give a satisfactory conclusion to the strange situation which takes place here, and strange direction by Daniel Mann makes it clear that maybe this play belonged more on the stage and could never work as a film. Over all, it is a fascinating failure.

blanche-2 Based on a play by Peter Shaffer, "Five Finger Exercise" from 1962 stars Rosalind Russell, Jack Hawkins, Richard Beymer, and Maximillian Schell.The plot concerns the presence of a German tutor (Schell) for the daughter (Lana Wood) in the family, and ensuing domestic problems that come to a boil.Russell plays Louise Harington, an unhappily married social climber who has nothing in common with her hard-working, down to earth husband Stanley (Hawkins). The son Philip (Beymer) joins them for the summer at their ostentatious vacation home, and the tension is immediate. Stanley wants Philip to join him in business, but Philip isn't sure what he wants to do. Then a tutor, Walter, is brought in to teach French to the daughter, and tensions really boil over. For Louise, he represents culture and romance, for Stanley, he's a pretentious annoyance, and for Philip, he represents a threat.Shaffer is a masterful playwright, and perhaps if his play had been correctly adapted to film, this would have been a magnificent drama. As it is, it's an interesting family drama.First off, the family is supposed to be British and in Britain, and the presence of the tutor brings up a lot of feelings about the war and the Nazis. Secondly, there is an underpinning of incestuous feelings between mother and son so that the presence of Walter makes Philip jealous. Both these elements are missing in the film. What remains is Louise's dashed romantic hopes and facing her harsh reality, which releases a firestorm.This isn't a bad drama by any means, it's just not the unusual film that it could have been. The acting is good if a bit overdrawn - that is partially because it is derived from a strong play. And the resolution is satisfying.Disappointing. One last thing - this was produced by Russell's husband, Frederick Brisson. At one point, Richard Beymer was fooling around on the set and Russell said something to him, asking him to stop. He replied that whatever he was doing was no big deal. She responded, "Well just remember this - I'M sleeping with the producer." I think he probably stopped misbehaving at that point.

kallahan 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.