“… [T]he only thing I didn't get too much of -- didn't get enough of,
really -- was Jessica Lange. Lange has suffered her share of razzing
over the years: she had the Faye Wray role in 1976's spoofy remake of
King Kong (frankly, I thought she was the best thing in it), and then
the thankless role of lusty Lady Death in
All That Jazz. In
Postman,
she exudes a spacey, dangerous intelligence that reminds me of Tuesday
Weld, and like Weld, she has a horsey, toothy, expressive mouth that can
seduce someone one minute and hiss at him the next (whenever she kisses
Jack Nicholson, you wait to see whether the kiss will turn into a bite.)
Lange's sultriness is tremulous and a little scary; in her, violence
and sensuality mingle with an eerie ease. She may carry herself with a
model's casual grace -- her head erect, so that one can see the perfect
line of her jaw -- but you sense a tension running through her like a
live wire. In one scene, she threatens Nicholson, and the corners of
her mouth begin twitching the way Humphrey Bogart's used to do--except
that Lange's tic is fast and spasmodic and unplanned, as if a jagged
energy were pouring out of her unbidden. Watching Lange's performance,
one realizes that Cora is smarter and more complex than Frank, and
nobler, too--that it is she who turns him into a monster and she who can
save his soul. Jessica Lange is one of the few actresses around who
can play virgin and whore at the same time;
Postman makes me think she
can play everything in between as well.”
Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, March 24, 1981
________________
“…. For the first time, Rafelson has a woman as the central character;
and to that end he has opened our eyes to an actress written off for
mere prettiness. Jessica Lange's Cora is really a 'debut' as striking
as Faye Dunaway's in
Bonnie and Clyde….
“…. The movie is as
erotic as it is not because of the flesh shown or the orgasms displayed,
but because of the unerring awareness that two disconsolate people have
found a happiness that transcends their traps and their own limits, and
makes the act of murder seem unavoidable. Indeed, the central
imperative has the effect of turning the Greek husband, Nick (John
Colicos), into a stooge overlooked in the awarding of motive.
“Cora is so much less voluptuous than Lana Turner in the earlier film,
and so much more humane. Perhaps Jessica Lange is still one touch too
thoroughbred. There doesn't seem quite enough reason for her to be
sequestered in a back-road diner. Cain used her as something like
narrative bait, and the movies are still far from the abandonment of a
class system of glamour when looking at women. But the actress gives
Cora an untidy, pressing inarticulacy that is dispelled whenever she can
make love.
“Rafelson and Lange--and the deepening respect that
the music and Nicholson's Frank bestow on her--have produced a movie
about a woman's sexual desire that has no trace of male paranoia or
hostility. Voyeurism gives way to intimacy and abandon. With the
dropping of Cain's first-person narrative, the observing presence of the
film makes Cora the most sentient creature: a core of passion
canceling out the sleaziness of the melodrama….”
David Thomson Film Comment, date ?
Get whole review!
“In the early 1980s, it was easy to make a case for Jessica Lange as
the most exciting and dangerous young actress in America. (Debra Winger
was her closest rival, which may be a way of seeing how harsh America
is on threatening young women.) In one year, Lange won the best
supporting actress Oscar for
Tootsie… and a best actress nomination for
Frances… Moreover, having had a child by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lange was
in the process of winning away Sam Shepard from wife and family [note he
doesn't admire greatly Tootsie or Frances]. There was such ability and
authority, yet still she had the wild-eyed, untidy manner of a young
hitchhiker in Arkansas or Oklahoma. It was possible to believe in her
unusual upbringing: intense devotion to the northern Midwest; time in
Paris as a musician and dancer, before modeling in New York, and then
the stunning aplomb that pulled off
King Kong (76, John Guillermin) and
supplied the comedy of that unfairly berated remake.
“…. Her
breakthrough had come as a Cora worthy of James M. Cain in
The Postman
Always Rings Twice… , where she easily handled the neediness, the spite,
and the lunging desperation of a woman who deserved more than roadside
kitchens. This is still, arguably, her most complete and disturbing
performance….”
Thomson A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Third Edition (1994), p 420
___________________
“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
____________________
“Jessica Lange has a beautiful camera face that is still relatively new
to the public; she has been in only three pictures--
King Kong, How to
Beat the High Cost of Living, and
All That Jazz, where she was swathed
in gauze. (She seemed to be playing Our Lady of the Oxygen Tent.)
Rafelson and Mamet don't develop Cora's character--they put her through
changes instead. And, whether it's lack of training or of feeling,
there are times when you can almost read in Jessica Lange's eyes, "Am I
getting by with this? Is it all right?" But she's still the best
reason for seeing this
Postman. She has a great, expressive body.
Though she seemed slender and willowy in
King Kong and
The High Cost of
Living, here she looks good-sized--muscular but rounded, and with strong
flanks. She stands and walks with her rump out proudly, and it
dominates the movie. You have no trouble believing that Frank has to
grab her. With her short, curly blond hair, a Japanese silk wrapper
pulled tight, and a lewd, speculative smile, she's both seraphic and
steamy. Her closeups are sometimes unusually revealing when she's
almost still, but she also has startling moments--like her agonized
expression when she hears the crunch of Nick's skull. Rafelson directs
Jessica Lange very skillfully in many scenes; she's wonderful when she
tries to fight off Frank's first assault and then snarls, 'All right,
c'mon,' challenging him to show her what he can do. If there's
something missing--if she never quite catches fire--it's probably
because of the way the film has been distanced….”
Pauline Kael The New Yorker, April 6, 1981
Taking It All In, p 180
["Shepardize" Kael]
___________________
“…. There was neither romance nor electricity with Garfield and Turner,
whereas with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange there is genuine
eroticism, though of a nonromantic kind. Lange, particularly, is a
revelation as she suggests a '30s beauty like Frances Farmer unhobbled
by censorship, or a softer Dorothy Comingore unafflicted by Welles's
misogyny in
Citizen Kane. Rafelson is at his best, vis-a-vis his
predecessors, with the sex scenes….
“Unfortunately, Rafelson,
Mamet, Nicholson, Lange, and Company have made the sex so good that it
overwhelms Cain's very skimpy melodramatic plot. Almost everything in
this new production is ultimately stretched out of shape because of the
tendency to allow the detail to overwhelm the design….”
Andrew Sarris Village Voice, March 25-31, 1981
[last part out of context?]
___________________
“…. Why make it again? When Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange have their
first sexual encounter--a no-holds barred mating on the kitchen
table--it seems director Rafelson… and playwright David Mamet want to do
directly to the core of Cain's sadomasochistic sexuality with a freedom
earlier filmmakers were denied. Sex and violence--and how they
merge--will be the subject itself.
“If that was their intention, they haven't pulled it off….
“…. [Nicholson's] too innately sly an actor to be playing a victim of
passion. Jessica Lange, however, shows that she might turn into an
actress of some range. Her pale, thin-lipped beauty catches glimpses of
the haunted, hungry Midwestern girl Cain had in mind, though her part is
underdeveloped….”
David Ansen Newsweek, March 23, 1981
___________________
“…. Streep doesn't inhabit her body in the way that an actress like
Jessica Lange or Debra Winger or even a beginner like Cher does.
“Jessica Lange is physically present on screen in a way that few movie
actresses have ever been--Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren and, perhaps in a
different way, Marilyn Monroe. In
The Postman Always Rings Twice she
anchors the character of Cora directly in her body: we can feel the
suppressed rage and desire in her muscular neck and shoulders, and in
the powerful curve of her back. One look at her and you know that this
woman is no pushover. And from the way she cocks her head and narrows
her eyes at Frank it's clear that there's not much in life that she
hasn't seen before, particularly when it comes to men. In Postman, Lange
makes no attempt to hold herself in physically, and her solidity on the
screen is a kind of a challenge. It says, "Go ahead. Try to knock me
over. Give it your best shot."….
“In
Frances, Lange isn't as
boldly sexual as she was in
Postman, but she gives the character a
primal vitality that is sexual in a more subtle way….”
Hal Hinson Boston Phoenix, October 2, 1984
title ?
[left out little gen comments after Frances]
___________________
“Cloning may be new in science, but it's old in Hollywood. Got a
successful star? Clone him/her. Sigourney Weaver is patently being
groomed to be another Jane Fonda. You don't have to adore everything
Fonda has done to be mild about Weaver's chances. Now comes Jessica
Lange, first noted in the remake of
King Kong, whom some apparently see
as a new Faye Dunaway. Lange can wear clingy cheap clothes
provocatively, she has blunt sensual features, so in her new film she is
put through a lot of sweat and sultriness to remind us of the early
Bonnie in
Bonnie and Clyde. But Dunaway--sometimes, anyway--is an
actress of sustained power. No hint of that yet from Lange.”
Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, April 11, 1981