Strenuous uplift by way of Broadway (the Mark Medoff play), about a speech teacher of deaf eleventh-graders. We see little of the man's daily teaching techniques (and hear little of the sounds of deaf people's speech), only what the headmaster disapprovingly terms "razzle-dazzle": standing on his hands in the classroom, choreographing a rock-and-roll number for Parents' Day. And he soon becomes preoccupied with a beautiful, twenty-five-year-old graduate of the school, now one of its janitors. She, however, has never learned to speak or to read lips (and because she is "angry," her sign language is very fast and florid). This premise means that the lead actor will not only say his own lines out loud, accompanied of course by hand-signals, but he will have to translate her lines out loud, too. (Did the filmmakers ever contemplate subtitles for sign language?) This, needless to say, is a challenge for any actor -- even without the attempt to express the slow movement from Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in body language. It is more like a chore for any viewer. William Hurt, Marlee Matlin, Piper Laurie, Philip Bosco; directed by Randa Haines. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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