Grandmothers Are People Too

Youth constitutes 56% of the movie audiences. But what about the other 44%? Isn't their money just as good as the kids'? Better, declare the makers of A Walk in the Spring Rain. And so they have produced a menopausal melodrama reminiscent of an old Ladies' Home Journal serial. All that is missing are three staples and a recipe for lemon chiffon pie.

Libby Meredith (Ingrid Bergman) is bored. Her professorial husband Roger (Fritz Weaver) is a pedant who sprinkles even casual conversation with chalk dust. On Roger's sabbatical, the Merediths flee New York for a Tennessee farm. But while Roger is examining constitutional law, Libby sets to work fracturing some commandments. For lurking in the barn is the local satyr, Will Cade (Anthony Quinn). "I'm a grandmother," protests Libby at first. "There's a lot of woman left in ya," grunts Will.

As students of pulp are aware, when a wife steps out of line, clouds form, hearts crack and marriages eventually heal. Old Will is left in Tennessee muttering, "I'll wait for ya; I ain't never going ta die." Indeed he won't. Fifty years from now he will still be surfacing as temptation in overalls, a persistent figure in women's fiction from D.H. Lawrence to Jacqueline Susann.

What does it matter if Anthony Quinn's ersatz Tennessee accent makes him seem the subject of the Scopes trial? Who cares if Ingrid Bergman's good Swedish bones and wholly preserved beauty are squandered? Grandmothers are people too. And Alexander Portnoy isn't the only one with fantasies.

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