David Denby

“Encased in white turbans and tops, Lana Turner's Cora was movie-queen sluttish--all studied poses of petulance, desire, repressed fury. Turner's motif was the lipstick that teasingly rolled out of her hand toward Garfield in the opening scene. One can't imagine Jessica Lange's Cora using much lipstick. She is meant to be not an eroticized image but an actual woman in heat, with blond hair falling on a dampened face and legs held apart, revealing strong white thighs. Jessica Lange, the ex-model who was the only good thing in the King Kong remake, uses her dreamy voice and her thin, slightly twisted upper lip, drawn back from her teeth, to suggest an inexhaustible erotic ravenousness. Lange might have had a triumph in this movie if she had been given some better lines and a handsome, vibrant young actor to work with. Mamet has dropped the vulgarities and the pulpy animal-woman talk that Cain wrote for Cora, but he hasn't put anything in their place. She's hungry, and that's about all she is; one gets a little tired of that mouth hanging open. When this Cora is matched with Nicholson's Frank there's no wild romantic tension: He's a squalid, aging failure, and when he dominates her, Cain's meaning gets reversed; she can't "destroy" a man who is already finished.”

David Denby
New York, March 30, 1981