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The World of Henry Orient (1964)
In director George Roy Hill's coming-of-age drama-comedy,
with a semi-autobiographical screenplay based on Nora Johnson's novel:
- the mischievous girlish-teenage, authentic-sounding
friendship between two 14 year-old urban private school students:
gifted and bright Valerie "Val" Boyd (Tippy Walker) and
Marian 'Gil' Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth) who pranced with endless exhilaration
and energy through many blocks of NYC, jumping while doing the
splits ("splitzing") over garbage cans and fire hydrants
- their stalking, obsession and imaginative infatuation
and idolization of eccentric, vain, self-centered, and mediocre concert
pianist and lothario Henry Orient (Peter Sellers in his first US
film, basing his performance on Oscar Levant), even in the first
scene spying on him kissing skittish married housewife Stella Dunnworthy
(Paula Prentiss) from the suburbs behind a large rock in Manhattan-NY's
Central Park, and thwarting subsequent dalliances with her - while
wearing conical Chinese peasant straw hats and tormenting Orient
- the contrast between the family life of the two girls
-- the more stable and modest Marian with her kind, divorced mother
Mrs. Avis Gilbert (Phyllis Thaxter) and understanding co-spinster "Aunt"
Erica "Boothy" Booth (Bibi Osterwald), and the emotionally-disturbed,
seemingly-unwanted Val (who regularly met with a psychiatrist), with
wealthy parents living abroad who were busily engaged in international
trade
- the scene of the two girls spying on Henry Orient
(who feared the girls were spies sent by the wronged husband), and
the devastating discovery that Val's rich, snobby and bitchy mother
Isabel Boyd (Angela Lansbury) was also entrapped by the pianist's
womanizing charms - and competitively turned her daughter's fantasies
into reality
- understanding father Frank Boyd's (Tom Bosley) coming
to his senses (and knowing Isabel's lying deception) in a bittersweet
scene, and his comforting assurances to daughter Val that he would
be divorcing Isabel to finally be a single father to her
- the final scene when the two girls, now a little older
and more mature, met again and shared more advanced teenaged thoughts
about boys, while comparing new hairdos, and applying lipstick
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