Saturday Night Cinema: Toys in the Attic

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema film is the dark melodrama Toys in the Attic, starring Geraldine Page, a singular talent and arguably one of the greatest of the 20th century. At least I think so.

Toys in the Attic is a 1963 American drama film starring Dean Martin, Geraldine Page, Yvette Mimieux, Gene Tierney and Wendy Hiller. The film was directed by George Roy Hill and is based on a Tony Award-winning play with the same name by Lillian Hellman. The original music score was composed by George Duning.

The film was nominated for the Best Costume Design (Black & White) Academy Award (Bill Thomas), and for the Best Actress Golden Globe (Geraldine Page) and the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe (Wendy Hiller).

Julian Berniers (Dean Martin ) return from Illinois with his young bride Lily (Yvette Mimieux) to the family in New Orleans. Sisters Carrie (Geraldine Page) and Anne (Wendy Hiller) welcome the couple, who arrive with expensive gifts for the spinsters. The sisters hope brother Julian will help with much needed expenses, and he tells them his profitable factory went out of business but that he managed to save some money. It turns out Julian pulled of a real estate scam and took off with the dough.

There is plenty of emotional savagery as Hellman mines the twisted psychological profiles of her Southern characters. The first time I saw this film I was a kid, and the final scene haunted me for months. It never left me.

Of course Crowther is his usual impossible to please, ornery self in the 1963 film review. It’s a damn good film. Toys in the Attic (1963)

The Screen: ‘Toys in the Attic’ Opens:Scenario Is From Play by Lillian Hellman

By Bosley Crowther

Published: August 1, 1963

SOMEBODY out there in Hollywood has made even more of a wreck of Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic” than was made of it on the stage. I would say the responsible party is the director, George Roy Hill.

With an eye more for melodramatics than for contours of character that might make plausible its story of two spinster sisters’ odd devotion to their brother, Mr. Hill has allowed this turgid drama and his avid actors to get completely out of hand and run wild in a baffling confusion of theatrical bursts and attitudes.

From the way it looks in performance, this picture, which opened yesterday at Cinema I, the Astor and other theaters in the New York area, seems more like a cross between “East Lynne” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” than it seems like the play of Miss Hellman that won the Drama Critics award in 1960.

Most conspicuous contribution to confusion is the performance that Geraldine Page gives as the younger, more eccentric of the sisters in a musty old house in New Orleans. It is not just that she is exhaustingly flexible, fluttery and shrill in her mad making-over her wayward brother who turns up with his young wife to rest a spell. It is simply that she is permitted to make such radical jumps in emotional reactions and rhythms that you never know where you are with her.

Miss Page, under Mr. Hill’s direction, is a pinwheel whenever she’s on. She sizzles and pops and spins in circles. But what’s at the core of her? Who knows!

Wendy Hiller comes through a little better as the older sister who also tends to spoil the reckless brother and childishly indulge him in his irresponsible ways. There’s a bit of a sense of deep disorder in her moods of loftiness and gravity. But she, too, makes so many switches, changes so much from scene to scene, that it is hard to grasp the cause of her affection and her evident sibling jealousy.

But, then, the object of their idolatry, their brother, whom Dean Martin plays with all the subtlety of a fugitive from “the rat pack,” is an uncertain character, too. Why he should be so erratic and make such elaborate displays of affection for his suffocating sisters is never conveyed in valid terms. All we see from Mr. Martin is a lot of big gestures, broad smiles and blank stares.

Yvette Mimieux as his wife is likewise showy but without plausibility, and Gene Tierney is a blank as the latter’s mother, a random figure in a melodramatic plot.

For what it all finally boils down to is a standard flash of slugging violence, based on a badly confused sex situation in which the brother is involved. And even this is shallow and silly when, after a brutal beating-up, the brother is rushed home by his sisters to go through a big confrontation scene with them, blood still bubbling from contusions and hot air escaping from split seams.

Alas, the poor “Toys in the Attic” has been made into such a hodge-podge by Mr. Hill—and, of course, by James Poe, his scenarist—that “Bats in the Belfry” would be a better tag.
The Cast
TOYS IN THE ATTIC, screenplay by James Poe, from the stage play by Lillian Hellman, directed by George Roy Hill and produced by Walter Mirisch for United Artists release. At the Astor, Broadway at 45th Street; Cinema I, Third Avenue at 60th Street, and other houses in the metropolitan area. Running time: 90 minutes.
Julian Berniers . . . . . Dean Martin
Carrie Berniers . . . . . Geraldine Page
Anna Berniers . . . . . Wendy Hiller
Lily Prine Berniers . . . . . Yvette Mimieux
Albertine Prine . . . . . Gene Tierney
Charlotic Warkins . . . . . Nan Martin
Cyrus Warkins . . . . . Larry Gates
Henry Simpson . . . . . Frank Silvera
Gus . . . . . Charles Lampkin

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