Reviews

This one, directed by Tod Browning, is a perfect Gilbert silent. It takes place in the sort of sordid and atmospheric world Browning loved -- in this case in Budapest, surrounding a "Palace of Illusions" (an urban sideshow).

Gilbert is re-teamed with Renee Adoree, and once again they work extremely well together. He's the barker and all-round utility performer (he has to be John the Baptist and take part in the beheading trick that's part of their little Salome play). It's part of the fable-quality of the story that he's simply given the name Cock Robin, from the nursery rhyme:

Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, With my little bow and arrow ....

Adoree is the cooch dancer who plays Salome, and that's what she's called too. Lionel Barrymore is "The Greek," a brutal thief and murderer, who has taken on the role of her boyfriend. It isn't very clear how far this has gone, but it seems to be something new. He is basically forcing himself on her. She used to be involved with Gilbert, and still carries a torch for him. The jealous and dangerous Greek has a watchful eye out for any signs of rekindling, and a knife at the ready (Gilbert has a knife too; I said it was sordid).

Gilbert is a womanizer with no respect whatsoever for the female sex: he's perfectly willing to marry a stupid country girl who has just been orphaned, to get hold of her father's "whole hillsides of sheep." He's catnip to the female sex, and every woman in the movie desires him (this was the height of Gilbert's career and MGM was still handling him just right).

The story is compelling and very well plotted. You only have to accept a conveniently timed melodrama natural death and (this is only a problem now, with nature docs on TV) that a perfectly ordinary iguana is actually an extremely poisonous lizard from Madagascar. Everything else is pretty convincing. You think for a considerable time that you're in an early Von Stroheim film, a colorful movie in a convincing European setting, without a heart. You begin to think there's not a speck of redeemable stuff in Gilbert.

But the movie has something up its sleeve, and in the second half you may find yourself sobbing.

Nobody in silent films ever looked at a woman the way Gilbert did. The cynical look where he's on to the dame and her games, undresses her with his eyes, and sees all the bad in her .... that Valentino could do. But the other look, where he comprehends a woman in all her power and goodness, or absorbs all her allure like a blow, is Gilbert's alone.

To know something of his history is to know that his mother was a popular actress who abandoned him to relatives and strangers while she went on seedy tours with a repertory company. He never had a loving mother or, it would seem, a loving substitute. His first girlfriend, another actress, died horribly at Ince studios when a balcony set collapsed.

Gilbert was a ladies' man, and there were a lot of women in his life, but he seems to have genuinely adored them and always relied on their kindness and warmth to him. Women dug him right back, in life and on the screen. He's able to put all his emotional need into one intense look from those dark and brooding eyes.

Adoree isn't our present idea of a beauty. She has -- as we see in her Salome dance in a two piece Harem outfit -- no waist. But it doesn't matter a speck here, as it adds to the ordinariness and seediness of this claustrophobic world of the urban poor. And her acting is highly effective. Actually, so is all the acting. There's an ensemble of very able players in a lot of colorful and distinctive parts.

The print TCM showed is terrific, and it has an unusually effective new orchestral score by Darrell Raby. This one was well worth copying and will be well worth keeping.

If this represents the level of quality of Charles Ray's films (and I'll bet it does; it comes from Thomas Ince's well-oiled factory) I can readily understand his stardom. The movie is very well made, and very well directed by Jerome Storm, whom I've never heard of, but the man directed at least 47 films between 1917 and 1932, and he did a nice job here.

Ray himself is delightful. He's cute as a button (you just want to put him in your pocket) and very skilled. He was also quite good playing a continental rake in The Garden of Eden, so the man had some versatility. So what the hell happened with Ray? I can understand his star falling, but why wasn't he able to transition to decent second leads and character parts? He couldn't even have been a wisecracking sidekick? He looks perfect for it.

Colleen Moore is a breath of spring here, as usual. Moore illustrates the odd fact about the silent era that you can play lead after lead for years and not be considered a star but merely an "artist." She needed the China doll hair to make her stand apart, and to find her "wholesome flapper" niche.

As for Gilbert, this was when he was doing anything and everything for Ince, and he's the spoiled rich boy here. I've seen it alleged that Gilbert without the mustache didn't register somehow, but I don't find that true here at all. He looks dreamy, and of course there's nothing wrong with his acting in this small part.

It's a very outdoorsy film (well, it's a baseball picture) and the movie gets the small town ambiance very well: chickens flapping around the homestead; a municipal baseball field; a tacky little local movie house; the arrival of a telegram inevitably assumed to mean a death. The brief big city scenes are well done as well, and there is a handsome urban hotel lobby in one scene.

This is the kind of non-slapstick (but still with a physical component) comedy of manners that hasn't endured from the silents as easily as the comedies of the silent clowns (it's the kind of movie Swanson was making with Bobby Vernon's unit for Sennett before the unit was dissolved and she was suddenly being asked to learn pratfalls). It's gentle and sweet and quietly amusing. Glad it has survived, and been restored so nicely.

First of all, it's basically a photographed stage play, though it's all done in a studio (with neutral backdrops and extremely minimal scenery), not in a theatre in front of an audience. If that turns you off, okay, but it's hardly unprecedented.

Apart from that annoying clarinet, I quite like it. It's a nice to see the Wedekind play done straight (though liberties are taken, names are anglicized and marks become dollars), not to take anything away from the musical "Spring's Awakening."

Although the attitude towards sex education may have changed, and our mores, and the amount of information available to children, human nature has not. The way the people grope for answers and try to understand their own feelings and impulses and physicality is timeless.

The acting under Seidelman's direction is very good. Jesse Lee Soffer is very charismatic, Constance Towers is excellent. Bridget Moloney does wonderful things with her little part. There is some tasteful and artistically justified nudity, none of it full frontal.

A clever idea of Seidelman's is to have the teachers (but not the headmaster) in the faculty meeting where Michael is expelled wear carnival masks. It allows them to be doubled (which one senses they are) by the young actors playing the students and thereby adds an extra dimension to the caricatures they basically are.

But over all, the spareness of the production, the fact that it focuses on the generations in the way it does, and the English names and places (New Hampshire is actually mentioned) cause it to dialogue with "Our Town." It becomes the more unflinching cousin of the Wilder play. The dead even come back.

Focusing on the aestheticized violence (the slow motion gladiatorial bouts, the CGI beheadings, etc.) and the nudity ignores some important surprises. I thought the show was just going to be a homoerotic "300" ripoff, and actually it's far better than that.

Much more so than that silly film, this show is actually very accurate: about the Roman class structure, the position of the gladiator, the squalor of slavery, the religion and superstition of the Romans, their mores, even the desperation of of a Roman town without a reliable source of water. I was expecting them to be very loosey goosey about historical accuracy (like "300" with its ridiculously portrayed Persians).

To my further surprise, I discovered that the extremely well-muscled gladiators on the show (the abilities of John Hannah go without saying) can actually act, and that the character conflicts are both interesting and believable. It's true that the show creates some adversaries in the arena scenes whose abilities and scariness are literally superhuman, and it's true that some of the combats portray skill and endurance that belong more to video games than the human body.

But it's also true that Roman economics -- the desperate need of families below for the patronage of those above, the possibility of freemen falling into slavery, the possibility of earning money as a slave and buying your way out -- are accurately portrayed. The sets look right, the costumes (allowing for the universally padded breechcloths on the gladiators) look right, the dialogue sounds right, the relationships feel right. There's even one homosexual gladiator with a younger slave minion, and -- accurately -- the other gladiators think nothing of it.

Yes it's a stylized show and a sensationalized show, but Rome really was just as violent and dangerous and precarious and sexed up and cruel as the show portrays. The surprise isn't that somebody created a show that looks like a high-end video game, or that it contains a lot of nudity and graphic violence. The surprise is that they bothered to give it so much substance and class. This, to my astonishment, is quality television.

I love Hollywood insider satires, and this is a great one, with convincing atmosphere and characters. Messing is delicious as a high-functioning Hollywood wife who is dumped by her narcissistic and spoiled movie executive husband after catering to his every need and whim efficiently for years. Needless to say, he's dumping her for a bimbo -- a Britney Spears-ish singer/starlet. In a self-imposed exile in the Malibu home of her oldest friend (Judy Davis), she meets an enigmatic surfer (Stephen Moyer) and has an ambiguous flirtation with her husband's boss, studio head Joe Mantegna. The triangle is very, very satisfying -- you're not quite sure which of these men you want her to end up with, and you like them both.

Dropped instantly by all the grasping, climbing manipulators and their wives, non-person Molly ends up falling back on her core of friends -- the wife of a director whose husband wants her to to drop Molly for tactical reasons, her wealthy dipso friend, and her gay decorator friend (Chris Diamantopoulos, who is broke after having to eat the cost of 12 hideous custom chairs a client insisted upon and then wouldn't pay for). She also becomes friends with the young black woman who works as the Malibu compound's security guard, and her mother. At one point, they all end up holed up in Judy Davis's house, like the treehouse crew in "The Grass Harp." The series is very well directed (by Jon Avnet) and the characters are very sharply drawn. Messing's husband is a monster of selfishness, but not consistently so, and he can't let go his habit of calling on Molly for (now inappropriate) favors. There isn't a line or a bit of business that Messing doesn't play to the hilt. Again and again Molly demonstrates the resourcefulness and elan that makes her husband such a fool for ditching her. There's a scene where she catches a cricket her husband has assigned his executive assistant to remove from the house (until she locates the annoying insect, she can't attend her grandfather's 80th birthday party) in no time flat that was particularly piquant.

This is a woman's story, but I think a lot of men will appreciate the sardonic portrait of a materialistic and phony Hollywood milieu, and I don't know how anybody could not want to look at all these gorgeous residences.

"Forever Knight" was a cheesy show, but the TV movie it was taken from -- "Nick Knight" -- with Rick Springfield was brilliant. It had much better production values than "Forever Knight" and it was both hipper and grittier. And it was better than the episode of "Moonlight" -- a suspiciously similar series -- I saw.

Rick drove a big-ass vintage pink Cadillac, because if he was caught when the sun came up it had the largest trunk available for him to dive into and hibernate until night. He was working with a sympathetic coroner to try and wean himself from blood (which in any case he never took from people -- he had blood lab bottles in his refrigerator).

The coroner guy was a cross between a friend, an AA sponsor, and a medical researcher. Rick was often strung out from their regimen, just like a recovering addict. Not only did he have withdrawal symptoms if he didn't get enough plasma, but real food -- which he was trying to break into eating -- tended to make him sick. His relationship with this guy was the central ongoing one in the story. He lived in an apartment carved out of a Grauman-type movie palace (it was the upper lobby or something) so it had all this over the top decor that was both vampire and Old L.A. in feeling.

Springfield gave Nick a troubled rock star feel, hot and somewhat elegantly wasted. He was struggling with his life, and he just happened to have the hottest car, the coolest apartment, and the best jacket. He was such a good detective that the L.A.P.D. indulged his eccentric insistence on working only at night.

They should have simply greenlighted the show just the way it was, with Springfield in it, but instead it ended up an underbudgeted Canadian series with no realistic underpinnings, a lot of costume flashbacks, and Geraint Wynn-Davies's somewhat actorish performance. What's more, the minute Wynn-Davies got the part he started putting on weight and kept putting it on. I hated, hated, hated that show.

The cast is so appealing, the acting so on point, the dialogue so pert, the milieu so well-defined, the production values so there, the direction so sharp, the look so polished, that it is agonizing to realize as the movie goes on how clichéd and stale the story is -- the honest musician seduced into the sleazy and superficial starmaker machinery behind the popular song. The Right Girl versus the Wrong Girl (a sleazy Brazilian "I'm With the Band" babe whose hair, unlike the Right Girl's, isn't naturally blonde). And then, God help us, a mad dash to the airport to stop the girl from leaving. You think you're seeing something as smart about the upcoming performer scene as the late lamented TV series "Unscripted" and then you find out you're seeing "She's All That." I don't want my two hours back, I want the cast to have their two months (or whatever it was) back. They could have been making a much better movie. My only consolation is that the clips will look great in everybody's talent reel; all the scenes will seem better, taken out of context.

I saw this last week at a gay and lesbian film festival, and quite liked it. It wasn't what I expected at all. I thought we'd have adorable blonde surfers caressed by the bright Australian sun during carefully timed outdoor shoots. The guys are cute, but mainly because they're young and do something physical -- they're not preposterously cute. They're a bit ... well, not vacuous, but limited in their interests. There's no indication that anybody willingly opens a book. The town they live in may have a beach and waves but it's a dreary little backwater where money is hard to come by and people fall into sex situations for lack of much else to do. The kids may be inexperienced and untutored but they're not particularly innocent, and the adults don't seem to be much different from the kids -- just various degrees of Older.

The director seems unsure how to go about making a conventional film properly, so he gropes, and ends up making the movie very interestingly. There are establishing shots we don't need, of things that aren't important. And somehow the arbitrariness of that echoes the characters' ennui and drift and cluelessness.

The young people are nice enough, and they have real feelings for one another, but their imaginations are so limited that life seems like a choice between (a.) sticking around and doing some kind of poorly paid labor or (b.) going out and seeing the world -- subsisting on various kinds of poorly paid labor. The first place that comes to mind is always Paris, France, and somebody always points out that there are no waves there. Cass, who has traveled the globe, has no stories of doing anything but working in supermarkets. He paints no pictures of his experience. The main advantage the larger world seems to have is that his parents aren't in it, and it's away from this nothing town.

The hero Midget (Jack Baxter) is sweet and pretty born loser who shares (platonically and by necessity) a small bed with his slutty mother (we never see her awake, and we only see the back of her head or an occasional hand). He's illegitimate and doesn't know who his dad is, and his big escape is smoking grass and/or putting on sound-blocking headphones and blissing out on rock music. (There's a great scene of a teen party where everybody is dancing to different music through the earbuds of his individual IPOD.) Back from a lengthy exile comes his best friend's runaway brother Cass -- who has fled the shame of being exposed in a homosexual affair with the 30ish local geometry teacher. Knowing that Cass swings that way, and having apparently been attracted to him for years anyway, Midget initiates a secretive affair.

The movie indulges itself in a few kinds of welcome whimsy -- Midget's secret summer job is pretty kinky, and Catholic Cass's bedroom photo of John Paul II, and his various kitschy holy pictures and statues, carry on an animated conversation in (subtitled) Italian, with some holy figures criticizing the libidinous boys and others defending them. This isn't the ubiquitous gay coming of age picture. It's really quite charmingly different, and even its crudities (like the trouble they have racking shots) seem to add to its charm. The sky always seems to be overcast, even on surfing days, and the whole gray atmosphere is all too real and familiar. It would probably be familiar even to a lot of 17 year olds in Paris.

A stunning performance of the Strauss opera. Stratas is one of the great actresses of the operatic stage, and one of the few petite enough to play a physically convincing Salome. She can seem like a child on stage, and of how many divas can you say that? This, like "Lulu," is an opera the lady simply owns. The production exudes sex (the John the Baptist is pretty hot too, which helps a lot), and it's very faithful to the spirit of the original, with a Beardsley-esqe quality to the production design that is NOT, however, cartoonish. If you happen to like the opera in the first place, this is satisfying in every way, on every level. If the opera leaves you cold, well, even then you have to admit that they've done it proud.

In a number of different ways, "Sadie Thompson" shows how much guts Gloria Swanson had. In the first place, it wouldn't even exist if she hadn't turned down an extremely lucrative contract from Famous Players/Lasky in order to become her own producer at United Artists. There had been a gentlemen's agreement among the major Hollywood producers that none of them would buy the play "Rain," but Swanson was of course not a party to it. What she actually did was very clever and sneaky. She bought Maugham's original story "The Fall of a Leaf" -- not the stage adaptation by Clemence Dane -- and thus stayed under the radar. The theatrical producers didn't control movie rights to the story. Then she got Will Hays to approve an adaptation of that short story, keeping the wool over his eyes a bit and using all of her feminine charm. Hays was a Swanson fan (most men, I gather, were) and the lady got her way and put it over on Mayer, Laemmle, Zukor, et al. She did make some concessions, however, the most important one being that Lionel Barrymore not play a clergyman. If you notice, he's not called Reverend Davidson here, but Mister Davidson. It hardly matters, since nobody who saw the film ever thought of him as anything but a minister. Swanson's instincts were right on target in every department. She had hired Walsh to direct and suddenly realized he should be her leading man, and he's stupendous. They had a delightful, easy rapport, and although Walsh has sex appeal he's no movie Adonis, keeping it real. Swanson also dared to wear becoming but flashy and inelegant clothes, which was risky for the movies' most notable clotheshorse (the last time she had dressed dowdy, while under contract, the audiences stayed away, and the studio never let her do it again). Swanson's Sadie is able to live her life with good cheer because she genuinely likes men. This was certainly true of Swanson, whose father was out of the picture early, and who was always looking for a strong man. She was extremely curious, and always gravitated to the people at parties who knew the most -- usually the guys. Gloria Swanson as Sadie is kinetic. Her gaiety and charm are so incandescent that the biggest sin as you are watching the movie would have to be anything that dimmed her light. Davidson makes it go out, and that's exactly what happens to Swanson. When she "reforms," all the light goes right out of her. Barrymore is great, and we are so fortunate to have the movie in any form. It's probably Swanson's best performance outside of "Sunset Boulevard," and it's a great movie performance by any standard. Which brings to mind another point. No actress in Swanson's lifetime up to that point had ever given a more celebrated performance than Jeanne Eagels in "Rain," and Gloria dared to risk comparisons that would inevitably be made. We can't make those comparisons now, but you can't watch the movie and not feel that this lady, so made for the camera, so perfectly in control of all the tools of silent movie acting, gave Jeanne a run for her money.

(Despite another comment here, Swanson's liaison with Joseph Kennedy did not give her "the clout to become her own producer." At the time Swanson went to UA, she hadn't even met Joe Kennedy, and she didn't meet him until after she had already produced "Sadie Thompson." Kennedy was a very minor player in the movies, and Swanson was one of the biggest stars in the world. If anything, she gave HIM clout. Indeed, when he did become her partner in Gloria Productions, he seems to have robbed her blind, even billing her production company for his own gifts to her. Kennedy, staunchly Catholic if hypocritical, strongly disapproved of "Sadie Thompson.")

True, it isn't "Sunrise" (what is?) and it isn't even the complete silent version as Murnau envisioned it, but it's still a beautifully expressive film from one of the great masters. What's more, it's the only film I've ever seen which pinpoints a pivotal moment in American history (it seems to be set before the Crash). One thing that precipitated the Great Depression was the squeeze on farmers, who had no profit margin at all, and whose only recourse was to plant more and more, unwittingly worsening their own situation. One of the conflicts is that Charles Farrell is sent to the city to sell the wheat crop at the most advantageous price (and this is a desperate necessity), and not only fails to do so but comes home with a (perhaps unsuitable) new wife. The family patriarch has planted the farm in wheat right up to the front door, and even reprimands his little girl for picking a stalk of it to play with. They are drowning in a product everybody needs but which barely supports them, and on which they are completely dependent. The contrast between an agricultural America far from idyllic and a motorized city whose drudgery for most is at least as bad is redeemed by the awakening of human feelings and re-ordered priorities. Nothing will save these people but love and family.

Gorgeous-looking film with Esther as a good-time girl and Chandler as a man hiding from his own café-society sleazy past, brought together by an accident that lands Esther and playboy Carlos Thompson on a Mediterranean island. The stars and the scenery look grand in Technicolor, and the film is very sexy, if inconsequential. There's a nice subplot in which a jealous local youth keeps shooting at everybody from his boat because Podesta won't marry him. Williams and Chandler make a hot pair, and it makes me even more regretful that she later talked trash about him in her memoirs. It's not even as if she had a score to settle. Carlos Thompson looks amazing, but he seems to be dubbed by another actor.

I went to see this at age 15 because I enjoyed the Stanley Ellin book it's based on. The movie is imitation Hitchcock of a very high order. (The climax in the Colosseum is pure Hitchcock.) Peppard is supposed to be a washed up boxer, and he has just the beat-up, world-weary sexiness the part needs. Inger Stevens is very glamorous as the lady of the house with her problems and secrets. The Paris setting is very well used, and that's important because the movie has a unique premise. The villains are pied noir terrorists left over from the Algerian revolution, displaced from their colonial home, reactionary, and deeply opposed to the French government of that appeaser DeGaulle. It gives a certain reality to the mysterious goings on. I thought the film did full justice to the novel, except that they unavoidably dispensed with the novel's use of Tarot cards to organize the chapters thematically. The music is great too. There's a title song in French that I'd love to have a recording of. It's sad to see Stevens looking so lovely and giving such a good performance so close to her tragic real-life suicide. She was special, and there's great chemistry between her and Peppard.

Spacey is long in the tooth for it, and yes that does matter, but if he were a few years younger who's to say that he'd be the assured actor who performs this part so well? The movie has some biopic clichés, and some obvious stylistic borrowings, but it tells an interesting story rather well, and it's very easy to get caught in its spell. The inevitable fight scene between Spacey's Darin and Kate Bosworth's Sandra Dee is so deliciously written, and the leads sink their teeth into it with such relish, that it's absolutely irresistible. If Dee really talked like that behind closed doors, I'm going to have to open up some new space in my Respect File. Darin really does deserve the attention too. He was a major talent. By the by, the closing production number is dynamite.

The filmmakers built up the part of Brett's Russian admirer for Leonard Nimoy, and added a murder -- not trusting the Hemingway plot to hold the audience. I actually liked Hart Bochner's world weary hero, and Jane Seymour isn't bad. Robert Carradine is absolutely marvelous -- one of our most underrated actors. The movie gets the period pretty well, and the real locations help a great deal. But Leonard Nimoy ........ oh. my. God. He is truly terrible. He disdains to trouble himself with any sort of Russian accent, and his mustache twirling turn is phony baloney every step of the way. I have never looked at him the same way since. This is basically a project designed to say, loudly, that Hemingway's novel cannot be dramatized. That's pretty much its message, forget the Lost Generation stuff, even though the script does treat of the horribleness of WW1 and its aftermath. Considering how awful this travesty is, I don't think its makers are in any position to criticize the original material. I await another Sun Also Rises adaptation that stays true to the original, as this does not, gets the period (as this does and the 20th Century Fox film does not) and gives us a Jake and a Robert Cohn this effective, and a Brett a little more so. Seymour, as I say, isn't bad (she gets Brett's privileged Englishwoman dimension down pat), but she's not ideal. Gardner had the hormonal quality Brett needs, but couldn't do the upper class Englishwoman thing one bit.

Shearer's all right, but I'll always wonder if Marion Davies, who was dying to play the part, might not have been better. Davies had it tough at this point getting good scripts, but she was a natural for Marie. Her talent has been underrated. The movie definitely has its moments, but there are problems. The opulence is so unrelenting that it's actually rather numbing. Shearer is supposed to be attracted to Joseph Schildkraut, but with his painted face and lipstick and funny eyebrows it's hard to believe it. Power has never looked better, but he's a bit flat in a role that lacks dimension anyway. Daryl Zanuck (Power was under contract to Fox) was apparently so appalled that he vowed never to lend him out again. John Barrymore is a welcome addition, but what a bizarre decision to make Madame DuBarry (Gladys George) merely a vulgar and aged (George was supposedly 38, but seems older) roadhouse "ho"! DuBarry had too much competition at Versailles not to make a better appearance than that. Crass she may have been, but come on! I'm afraid they stacked the deck, as usual, to make Shearer shine, but she'd have shone more with a worthier adversary -- not necessarily the Dolores Del Rio of the marvelous "Madame DuBarry," but at least an Ona Munson type. I'm afraid Woody Van Dyke was a little journeyman-like in his direction. Probably his heart wasn't in it. The strain of such an "important" production seems to have sapped his flair and sense of play. That said, Shearer works hard (too visibly so, much of the time) and a lot of it pays off.

Rudy is very good, especially in the comedic parts. The story isn't much, and it would have helped if either of his leading ladies had been Vilma Banky (the less said about the desiccated-looking Gertrude Olmstead the better). But Nita Naldi's appeal is at least more apparent here than in "Blood and Sand," and her clothes, by Adrian, do a lot for her. What's more, though she's a bad girl, she's a believable one. The film should be seen for Rudy's charm, for William Cameron Menzies' very, very effective production design, and for the fact that the DVD is made from an absolutely gorgeous, velvety, pristine, 35 mm print. It looks better than any other DVD I'm aware of with Valentino. A hotel fire, which we learn about from a newspaper, should have been portrayed. It's really an obligatory scene, and the movie is rather naked without it. It might have put the picture in the hit category, had it been done well.

It's hard to know whether Dorothy Dalton was always a dud or if she simply hasn't worn well, but her appeal these days is not readily apparent. Since that's true of a number of ladies who once made multitudes salivate in the silents, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Her acting's okay. Despite her top billing, it's absolutely Rudy's picture, and he's very good in it. He never looked better, and it's a nice, varied, physical part. Despite his exotic looks, and the fact that he's given a Latin background, this is still a nice-boy part. Wallace Reid could have played it.

As with so many silents, one of the main draws is the realness and thereness of the exteriors. No need to record sound, so they go on location to San Francisco, they shoot on water, and I wouldn't take anything for the scene in front of a small movie house, where you get a feel of what it was like to walk in. TCM showed it in an absolutely marvelous, digitally restored print.

Movie adaptations from John O'Hara never really get it right. Either they're not frank enough or they sentimentalize or they just plain don't have the budget to put his world on screen. He's very specific about the historical moment when his stories take place. "A Rage to Live" (like "From the Terrace" and "Butterfield 8" as well) is transposed to a later time. It really might have helped if it could have shown us the changing manners and mores of a very specific Pennsylvania world. What I mainly remember it for is one of the two flat-out sexiest performances by a male in the movies that I can readily recall. The other one is Ray Danton in "Too Much, Too Soon." Gazzara is hotter than blazes in his part. A few years ago, when the actor Harry Reems was extradited to Tennessee for appearing in a porn film shot elsewhere that just happened to be sold there, Gazzara was one of his most vocal defenders. He was no kid, Gazzara, but he said "I work out every day. My body is in WONDERFUL shape. And if I want to do a porn film, I want the right to do one." Any surprise that he was so sexy in this film, or in "The Strange One"?

Flynn is very touching, and Malone is marvelous. Martin Milner and Efrem Zimbalist are sympathetic. But I have got to say something about Ray Danton, as a professional tennis player and sexual opportunist. As the guy who gets the married Malone into bed within minutes of meeting her, and persuades her to divorce her husband and marry him just about as fast, Danton is utterly convincing. It's one of the most flat-out sexy male performances I've ever seen. Actually, there are two that spring to mind, both in not particularly famous movies, and the other one is Ben Gazzara in "A Rage to Live." I just have to give a shout-out to Danton. He died a few years ago (only 61!), but his hot stuff lives on.

I'm starting to wonder why, every time Bonnie Bedelia gives a performance on the small screen, they don't give her an Emmy immediately. Her style of film acting is so perfectly suited to the television medium, her effects so perfectly judged, her work so intelligent and tasteful and felt, that it can hardly be improved upon. This performance, in a perfectly terrific part, is no exception.

The story itself is absorbing, and the script and direction give it its head and get out of its way -- not the easiest of tasks, given the conventions of television. There are conventions in this version, of course: (1) The presumably composite character of the unsympathetic relative who feels no sympathy for her deceased cousin if he's gay, wants it proved that he is not, and basically views the whole sorry mess as a shameful misfortune to her personally: a drama of which she is the center. That's a convention of these TV movies, but a useful one. Then there is (2) the music nudging our emotional reactions, probably unnecessarily.

But the relative is well-played and the music isn't particularly bombastic. The movie has great dignity, in fact, and all the acting is superb. Moreover, Bedelia is the center of it all, and with Bonnie Bedelia at the center of a story, the center always holds. Bravo!