New Movies: Daughter of Bacchus

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Like Tigairs. It is in those wasted, final years that Redgrave gives the film its ironic dimension. Isadora, in a flutter of unpaid bills and lisping parasites, refuses to give way to age. Her hair is dyed a defiant red, her face is a map of cracks and hollows—but the body still rages against the dying of the light. Although thin herself, Redgrave miraculously conveys grossness. As she writhes and leaps in Duncan's unique free-foot choreography, the actress further illuminates Isadora as a reconciliation of opposites—a naive sophisticate, a Continental hick, a selfless egotist who, Agnes de Mille recalls, "cleared away the rubbish. Isadora was a gigantic broom."

The film could have used that broom —most notably in the cluttered depiction of Isadora's marriage to Russian Poet Sergei Essenin. To portray the epileptic genius at high pitch, Yugoslav Actor Ivan Tchenko is called upon to leap bedward at Isadora and roar, "Ve make lawv like tigairs!" With that kind of dialogue, and no one to act against—or for—Redgrave cannot help turning the picture into a gigantic one-woman show. So, of course, was Isadora Duncan —but even she had help.