Blythe Danner, The Great Santini

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Stanley Kauffmann

“….The film is centrally about the Oedipal love-hate tussle between the pilot and his 18-year-old son, with Mrs. Meachum (the exquisite Blythe Danner) as understander of both and mediator between them….

“Robert Duvall … is strong …, but I think he’s got the part wrong. He sounds and moves like a city tough… The name, career, ethics of this man are straight military pro. I kept wondering how this reformed ghetto type got where he is and married Danner.

“Danner is a lovely woman and actress, one of the best we have just now. I’ve been a slave ever since The Miser and Twelth Night at the Vivian Beaumont, 10 or 11 years ago, right through to her performance in Pinter’s Betrayal last season on Broadway. She hasn’t yet had a screen role good enough for her. In Santini sh’es once again better than the script. In one sequence her son reads a letter that she wrote himj on his 18th birthday. We hear her voice speaking it as he reads, and it’s eye-brimming.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Repbulic, August ___, 1980

Pauline Kael

“…. Blythe Danner comes close to creating a believable woman out of an idealized mother figure, and she brings in shadings that help to suggest a real family, but as the genteel Southerner who mediates between her uncouth Northerner husband and their children, the finest young actress in the American theatre is confined to an essentially undramatic role. (She doesn’t have a single scene that is really hers.)….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, September 1, 1980
Taking It All In, p. 52