It must be hard to be a wealthy patriarch who is part tycoon, part clown. Dick Van Dyke could be a fine dramatic actor, but sadly here, he has been handed the most tedious of scripts that back in 1981 made me long for the glory days of the nighttime soap opera.
He's the father of three daughters from two ex-wives, one of them an unseen Mexican woman, the other the mysteriously troubled Marj Dusay. The two oldest daughters have strangely undeveloped love lives in the script, one moment trashy and seemingly sadomasochistic in nature. This leads the youngest daughter with the most interesting part, taking over Van Dyke's newspaper in a sequence almost a carbon copy of what you could have seen on "Dynasty" years before. Dusay's character had the potential to be another Alexis with her years of daytime experience playing similar characters, one of them (Alexandra Spaulding, "Guiding Light") ironically played briefly also by Joan Collins.
Their tables twist after a convoluted confrontation between Van Dyke and Dusay over her romance with an alleged crooked businessman won he was trying to expose. The screenplay is missing much needed detail to try to make any sense. It may have been also extremely badly edited. At the time this first aired, Dusay had just made a brief return to the daytime soap opera "Santa Barbara" as a troubled ex-wife dealing with resentments towards her powerful ex- husband. Her week long return to that show was Shakespeare in comparison to this.
There are much better sagas about dysfunctional families and half the problem is that Dusay's character, the most interesting in what remains, seems to have been greatly diluted in the final product. Her two daughters don't even have a leg to stand on in twice as many scenes as she had, coming off a sloppy second and third. I wish I could find something to recommend other than that, but this just ends up being a badly written soap opera where the author felt that just because they were putting words on paper that the final result would make sense. Sorry, not.
He's the father of three daughters from two ex-wives, one of them an unseen Mexican woman, the other the mysteriously troubled Marj Dusay. The two oldest daughters have strangely undeveloped love lives in the script, one moment trashy and seemingly sadomasochistic in nature. This leads the youngest daughter with the most interesting part, taking over Van Dyke's newspaper in a sequence almost a carbon copy of what you could have seen on "Dynasty" years before. Dusay's character had the potential to be another Alexis with her years of daytime experience playing similar characters, one of them (Alexandra Spaulding, "Guiding Light") ironically played briefly also by Joan Collins.
Their tables twist after a convoluted confrontation between Van Dyke and Dusay over her romance with an alleged crooked businessman won he was trying to expose. The screenplay is missing much needed detail to try to make any sense. It may have been also extremely badly edited. At the time this first aired, Dusay had just made a brief return to the daytime soap opera "Santa Barbara" as a troubled ex-wife dealing with resentments towards her powerful ex- husband. Her week long return to that show was Shakespeare in comparison to this.
There are much better sagas about dysfunctional families and half the problem is that Dusay's character, the most interesting in what remains, seems to have been greatly diluted in the final product. Her two daughters don't even have a leg to stand on in twice as many scenes as she had, coming off a sloppy second and third. I wish I could find something to recommend other than that, but this just ends up being a badly written soap opera where the author felt that just because they were putting words on paper that the final result would make sense. Sorry, not.