Reviews

While MTM is, with the two long running Bob Newhart shows (Chicago and New England), WKRP, Night Court at its best, Cheers, Third Rock, and above all the criminally maltreated Frank's Place, among the very best of American sitcoms, it was good because it was funny, not because of its place it some mythic crusade. Ms Moore herself (whom of course I adore), if not responsible for the claim, never rejects the fatuous notion that the Mary Richards character "broke new ground." Another reviewer mentions that MTM was preceded in this by Marlo Thomas, but more than two decades before either, a very savvy, happily single career woman was sharply portrayed by the incomparable Eve Arden as "Our Miss Brooks." But as more than one show sunk by the leaden weight of its social consciousness still demonstrates, Sam Goldwyn's advice still holds, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." Happily, in its time, MTM had no such intent, and was content to be funny. Often very funny.

Lange's convincing portrayal of the neurotic, alcoholic wife, and Tommy Lee's loving, patient coping-with (and covering for) her erraticisms make for a memorable first half. Unfortunately, the whole thing crashes down into preposterous infantile fantasy, with the woman unaccountable metamorphosing into a combination of Nancy Drew and all three of Charlie's Angels to save her husband from durance vile (Beethoven did it better in Fidelio)... As a guy, I'm not supposed to like "relationship" movies, but this one would have been infinitely better left as exactly that, with the comic-book adventure left out.

My admiration for Jennifer Jones defiantly survives her career-long penchant for goopy vehicles. This film, I note from existing comments, seems to inspire the kind of reverence that no rebuttal can dislodge, and so I'll merely suggest that it might be just a tad pretentious, that some might find it wordy, and that its ill-blended melange of pulp-fiction mysticism, pseudo-theology and "philosophy" adds up to nothing whatever. Some nice fantasy-effects in an impossible Central Park, and a Debussy-derived score that brings many a smile, as much for "the next bit that's left out" as for what's plundered -- it's an oddity, perhaps, that as a leitmotiv for the raven-tressed Jenny, "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair" was chosen, but I did miss the trumpet in the "La Mer" borrowing. Cotten is better in "The Third Man", Gish in "Night of the Hunter", and David Wayne anywhere he isn't wrestling with an Irish brogue that comes and goes like the Cheshire Cat.

Eight out of ten seems an extravagant score for a fairly nonsensical bit of cotton-candy, but earned, if only for the muted elegance of the "I'm Old-fashioned" number, which is the absolute essence of romance. Although he always maintained a tactful evasiveness on the subject, I suspect Rita Hayworth may have been Fred's favourite partner. She, nee Cancino, was born into a (flamenco) dancing family, and like Astaire, danced with her whole body. While he, as is evident from the long roster of screen partners (including the late TV specials), obviously believed, with some justice, that he could transform any reasonably adequate dancer into what was required, he must have rejoiced, making this and their other joint movie, to work with a woman whose instincts were, uncoached, a match for his own. See it.

It must be assumed that those who praised this film ("the greatest filmed opera ever," didn't I read somewhere?) either don't care for opera, don't care for Wagner, or don't care about anything except their desire to appear Cultured. Either as a representation of Wagner's swan-song, or as a movie, this strikes me as an unmitigated disaster, with a leaden reading of the score matched to a tricksy, lugubrious realisation of the text.

It's questionable that people with ideas as to what an opera (or, for that matter, a play, especially one by Shakespeare) is "about" should be allowed anywhere near a theatre or film studio; Syberberg, very fashionably, but without the smallest justification from Wagner's text, decided that Parsifal is "about" bisexual integration, so that the title character, in the latter stages, transmutes into a kind of beatnik babe, though one who continues to sing high tenor -- few if any of the actors in the film are the singers, and we get a double dose of Armin Jordan, the conductor, who is seen as the face (but not heard as the voice) of Amfortas, and also appears monstrously in double exposure as a kind of Batonzilla or Conductor Who Ate Monsalvat during the playing of the Good Friday music -- in which, by the way, the transcendant loveliness of nature is represented by a scattering of shopworn and flaccid crocuses stuck in ill-laid turf, an expedient which baffles me. In the theatre we sometimes have to piece out such imperfections with our thoughts, but I can't think why Syberberg couldn't splice in, for Parsifal and Gurnemanz, mountain pasture as lush as was provided for Julie Andrews in Sound of Music...

The sound is hard to endure, the high voices and the trumpets in particular possessing an aural glare that adds another sort of fatigue to our impatience with the uninspired conducting and paralytic unfolding of the ritual. Someone in another review mentioned the 1951 Bayreuth recording, and Knappertsbusch, though his tempi are often very slow, had what Jordan altogether lacks, a sense of pulse, a feeling for the ebb and flow of the music -- and, after half a century, the orchestral sound in that set, in modern pressings, is still superior to this film.

Another of the "classic" pictures whose reputation simply baffles me; I remember sitting through it in almost complete indifference, except when some particularly blatant piece of audience-manipulation outraged me. Another commentator has used the phrase "sly retelling," but am I the only one to identify this piece as a sly (and remarkably specious) reworking of the Gospels? The protagonist, in a threatening atmosphere suggesting Herod's massacre of the innocents, is discovered in a garage (modern equivalent of a stable), suffers the little children to come unto him, performs a healing miracle, is "crucified" by its captors, and after rising again. ascends to heaven, presumably to sit at the right hand of the Giant Head. But the nice part is that, unlike the original, embarrassing tale, this version makes absolutely no demands; one is not required to change one's cushy and acquisitive life, to sell one's worldly stuffed toys or love one's enemies or turn the other cheek; in Spielberg's soggy vision, all you need is sentimentality, and the suburbs go on as before.

Far more alarming than anything depicted in this clunker is the number of commentators in these pages who have praised the acting, the writing, or the humour, none of which rise to the level of a high-school show. On its non-existent merits, the movie deserves a comprehensive zero; I gave it a 3 assessing it in the same league as "Reefer Madness," "Glenn or Glenda," or the infamous "Plan Nine," pictures so staggeringly bad that a modicum of incredulous enjoyment derives (though only for a little while) from contemplating the sheer effrontery of putting them on display.

Well-acted but funereally-paced, with a seriously muddled sense of period (when IS this supposed to be?), and character-development, especially with the Jeff B. and Pfeiffer roles, that, as with TV soaps, depends more on one's recollection of other, better-written dramas than on anything that actually occurs in this film.

I thoroughly endorse the discernment of those commentators who draw particular attention to the performance, in this diabolically urbane comedy, of Dennis Price, so often ignored in our wonder at the Guinness eight-part tour de force. Sir (not then, but later!) Alec pulls off a masterly stunt, but Price sustains an immaculate, imperturbable through-performance that is the making of the film; a particular kind of actorly security is required to bring off this kind of suave irony. The Longfellow parody is defining: we see the Suffragette Guinness beginning a balloon-ascent in favour of Votes for Women; cut to Price, kneeling by an apartment window, drawing a longbow.

Price: (voice over) "I shot an arrow into the air."

Cut to an airsick Suffragette in the basket of a balloon in trouble.

Voice over: "She fell to earth in Berkely Square."

The infallible Miles Malleson and coolly regal Valerie Hobson also deserve mention; of the delicious Joan Greenwood I hardly dare to speak, lest the tremble in my voice betray me.

I'm surprised that none of those offering comments on this excellent picture have mentioned Rathbone's astonishing turn, in straw hat and blazer, as a "concert party" performer of the era, singing (and dancing) "Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside." In the Conan Doyle stories, one tends to accept with a large ladle of salt the "impenetrable" disguises adopted by Holmes, which time and again deceive even Watson, but this scene makes it all plausible; without heavy makeup or tons of false hair, mainly by simply thinking his way into the role, Rathbone makes himself virtually unrecognisable; one may stare absorbedly trying to pick up signs of the familiar Rathbone persona -- a few moments alone worth the price of admission.

Handsome, expensive, largely well-acted, and utterly stupid; chaotic history, a grotesque and impossible "solution" to the well-worn enigma of the "Immortal Beloved." The composer is shown performing the Emperor Concerto (which he never did, having by then acknowledged his deafness) at least seven years before its composition, and composing the F Major Quartet (finished, October 1826) on his deathbed (March, 1827) -- I mention these as merely symptomatic of the general fecklessness.

This is, I agree, and by a wide margin, the best fantasy-adventure film yet made; that assessment, unfortunately, says as much about the paucity of the genre as the splendours of 'Fellowship'. For once, the vast expenditure was not a case of `improved means to diminished ends'; no one who sees it will ever forget the nightmare vision of the orcs swarming down the pillars in Kazad-Dum (and as swiftly reversing the process at the appearance of the Balrog), nor the brief, chilling instant when the gentle Bilbo (Ian Holm's performance is faultless), reaching for the Ring, becomes a snarling pseudo-Gollum, a true cinematic translation of Tolkien's text. While many of the special effects have the familiarity of old acquaintances, none are bargain-basement, very few gratuitous (the silly `hallucinatory' stuff when Samwise nearly drowns is worse than unnecessary, but happily brief). But as so often in this era, where technology is prized above literacy, and websites equipped with state-of-the-art bells and whistles are not embarrassed to parade infantile errors of syntax, usage, and spelling, one is staggered that with all that money and all that technique being splashed about, people who claim to admire Tolkien can commit such follies at the purely verbal level. Did no one have enough of an ear to be jarred when either Pippin or Merry (I'm not sure), escaping from the irascible Farmer Cotton, says "He's definitely overreacting"? -- a phrase as impossible in Middle Earth as "No way", or "I am SO not okay with that." And Elrond, at the Council, is made to trot out the absurd mixed metaphor, "The LIST of our allies is growing THIN" -- the RANKS of one's allies might grow thin, or their list grow SHORT; as given the line is unmeaning.

As for omissions and condensations, most are unworrying; I wouldn't much miss Tom Bombadil if he were left out of the book, and the Barrow-Wight might well be one peril too many, but it seems to me very damaging that the film completely leaves out the ancient enmity between the Elves and the Dwarves, a hostility to which only the threat of Mordor can bring truce, and which, in the book gives edge to the exchanges and a poignancy to the developing friendship between Legolas and Gimli; deprived of it in the picture, these two characters are reduced to wallpaper. Again, if it was a question of time (though it would only have taken about a minute-and-a-half), I would have readily sacrificed one or two of those circling helicopter shots of battle to get in Gandalf's explanation of WHY the Dwarves of Moria "delved too deep and awoke ancient evils" -- that they were seeking mithril, found nowhere else. Gandalf's review of the properties of the metal, lengthy in the book, could easily be condensed, to reach the real point, his remark that Thorin gave Bilbo a mithril corslet, and that its worth was "more than the value of the whole Shire, and everything in it." Cut to a wonderstruck Frodo, slipping a hand inside his shirt -- all of which, at small cost, would give a great deal more point to the scene, soon to come, when the chain-mail saves Frodo's life. The only point of the silly bit of political correctness when the besworded Arwen gets the drop on Aragorn (who has maintained virtually sleepless vigilance for about sixty years) is perhaps to remind us that Zena, too, came from New Zealand, though the scene at the Fords of Bruinen, to which it leads, is admirably realised, the effect exactly as described by Tolkien. The film makes nothing of Lothlorien, although I would have thought its dreamlike quality, the sensation, as Samwise puts it, of being "inside a song", would be readily conveyed in purely cinematic terms. In general, and although New Zealand certainly supplies the raw material, and the cinematography was fine, what I missed most from the book was the author's acute feeling for place, terrain and climate and differing texture. All the great films derived from books -- Tom Jones, say, Great Expectations, The Third Man -- find visual-aural equivalents for verbal magic; "Fellowship" is a pretty good flick and perhaps a landmark in an otherwise undistinguished genre, but not the classic it might have been.

Someone who claims to have enjoyed this mess might like to attempt a brief summary of the plot, not omitting, as the film did WHY these boring people were doing what they were. Possibly the only really effective scene is simply lifted from Jules Dassin's `Topkapi', but the actor holding the rope in this version is nowhere near as interesting as Peter Ustinov in the original. Perhaps the silliest effect in motion picture history -- the entire train-in-the-Chunnel sequence is completely incredible -- occurs where the Cruse character throws himself back on the TGV using the explosion of the helicopter; see, fellows, the human cannonball at the circus is FAKED; human bodies are destroyed, not harmlessly transported, by explosions. Mmle. Beart, however, is worth remembering.

This is an astonishingly awful movie, given the level of the three main performances, by Spacey, Hunt and Osment. Even worse than the melange of plotlines, the determination to work in at least one "effective" moment from every known genre of film, from "Meet John Doe" to "The Parent Trap" to "Dead Poets Society" to "Grand Canyon" (and that's only a sampling), is the film's unctuous air of self-congratulation, over an idea of numbing naivete -- a kind of pyramid-scheme for Samaritanism, in fact rather less virtue than one is required to practice if one subscribes to any of the world's major religions. We're supposed to be as kind as we can to everyone, right from the start, not wait till somebody does something nice for us, then dole out our awakened goodness to a shortlist of three selected recipients. Others who have dispraised "Pay it Forward" have softened their censure by speaking of its "heart in the right place" or its "good intentions." But as is betrayed by its hauling in of an audience-tested cliche from every successful movie it could think of, its only real intention was to make a pile of money (in which I believe it failed). The makers could have demonstrated commitment to their theme by handing out the price of admission to three deserving cases for every one who bought a ticket to see this dud. That didn't happen, either.

One of the reviewers on this site calls Ed Wood a moviemaker "with something to say." That is precisely untrue. Wood's movies are like the ragbag ramblings of a garrulous pub raconteur, who has absolutely nothing to say, but goes on saying it till the hearer's eyes glaze over. His mind was a muddle past all sorting out; even here, dealing with the subject closest to his heart -- or at least, to his skin -- he is unable to decide whether to assert that cross-dressing is nothing to be upset about, or should be decriminalized, but treated psychiatrically -- while the looming interpolations from Lugosi suggest the whole subject is less than a step away from the diabolic -- although the sole really coherent line Lugosi speaks, his last, "the story is told," is a big, fat lie; as always with Wood, the story is the first casualty.

I greatly enjoyed the recent film bio of Ed Wood (especially the fictional but delicious encounter with Orson Welles, where genius and ineptitude find common ground in a love-feast of egocentric non-communication), but am unable to concur in the general belief that Wood had a passion for making movies. With every allowance for budgetary constraints and the patchwork production-schedules they imposed, Wood was slovenly, impatient past belief, either as a director, cinematographer or (above all) a writer for the screen; nothing is too hasty, too botched, too half-baked for him to put in the can. No, what he desired was the prestige, the self-esteem, the celebrity of being a man who had made movies, and the actual making was something to be got out of the way as cheaply, expeditiously and painlessly as possible. Even so, he remains a unique and rather lovable demonstration of ambition that can triumph over anything, even a complete absence of talent.

All right, it creaks a bit, now, and suffers from the staginess which afflicted many if not most British films of this period, but the Agatha Christie plot (with a strong family resemblance to that other hyper-theatrical melodrama, "Gaslight") is gripping, and the necessary claustrophobic atmosphere is established and maintained -- with help from the excellent score from a very youthful Benjamin Britten (I have, by the way, never come across a reference to this early effort in any Britten biography; it is unmentioned in the long article in Grove's Dictionary). Most of all, it's worth seeing for the terrifying performance by Basil Rathbone, which again reminds us what an accomplished and versatile actor was all-but obliterated in his later absorption into Sherlock Holmes. No goalie-mask, no retractile steel claws, no camera-tricks, he scares the pants off you using only an actor's equipment, and you'll never forget his portrayal of a psychotic, obsessive Bluebeard.

Whether this is the worst movie ever to be given Best Picture Oscar is a tricky question, when one thinks of, for example, "Dances With Wolves," "Titanic," and "Forrest Gump"... For Most Money and Research Used to Least Effect, the sinking of the White Star liner and the Roman Empire are just about a tie, but for contrived situations and dialogue that clanks worse than the armour (not to mention cheesy special effects), "Gladiator" is in a class of its own. The film's popularity, and its garland of ill-earned awards are a distressing instance of substituted reality (the late, unlamented Dr Paul Goebbels would have understood this very well), of hype feeding on itself: the movie, as a movie rather than a sales-campaign, is a dud.

A "Golden Age" movie that really doesn't bear revisiting. Both the main young women (Gene Tierney, Jean Crain) retain their contrasted charms, femme fatale and girl-next-door, respectively, but the casting of Cornell Wilde (normally a sort of bargain-basement Errol Flynn) in the central role is an insuperable weakness, and what's left completely falls apart in the utterly incoherent and grotesque "murder trial," where no one behaves in any way remotely like a human being.