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Isadora

1968, Movie, M, 128 mins

Isadora: Review

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This bloated pseudobiography (originally 177 minutes, later cut to 128 minutes) offers an expensive production and a nitwit story that would have offended the worst producer of B films at Monogram or Mascot. Wholly miscast is Redgrave as Isadora Duncan, the celebrated interpretive dancer, sexual vamp, and all-around eccentric. The film opens with Redgrave at age 49 dictating her unreliable memoirs, recounting her adolescent awe of ancient Greek tribal dancing, her music hall period as "Peppy Dora," her tempestuous love affair with artist Gordon Craig (Fox), marriage to sewing machine magnate Paris Singer (Robards), and marriage to lunatic Russian poet Sergei Essenin (Tchenko), along with the tragic death of her two small children (Singer's boy and girl drowned when the family chauffeur got out of the limousine to check something and the car rolled into a river). In flashback we painfully see Redgrave trying to enact the role of a teenage Isadora and a youthful Isadora and a ravishing Isadora bedding and wedding men willy-nilly, looking haggard, drawn, and old throughout, until she dies herself in a freak accident on the Riviera (her long silk scarf became entwined around the wheel of a sportscar, which roared away and snapped her neck in two). Redgrave and her supporting players, including the normally reliable Robards, are simply awful. She overreaches for the elusive character she is playing in every scene, and her dewy-eyed close-ups are embarrassing. When Redgrave does her dance numbers (she reportedly trained for six months to imitate Duncan's style), her 6-foot frame lumbers and thunders about like an elephant with the gout. Here she is simply awkward, graceless, and completely unattractive, particularly when doing her seven-veiled dance before Russian troops. In her frenetic attempt to capture the freethinking Isadora, Redgrave does nothing but make a fool of herself, and an unconvincing fool at that. She did receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but lost to Barbra Streisand in FUNNY GIRL. leave a comment
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Isadora Duncan: An Intimate Portrait
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Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography
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