Monthly Archives: March 2024

One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975)

Posted on March 27, 2024 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Nannies to the rescue.

Lord Southmere (Derek Nimmo) is on the run from Chinese spies lead by Hnup Wan (Peter Ustinov) after he gets his hands on a microdot that carries top secret information. After escaping the clutches of an assassin disguised as a chauffeur he runs into a nearby building, which happens to be the Natural History Museum. It is there that he hides the microdot in the skeleton of a dinosaur that’s on display. He then bumps into Hattie (Helen Hayes) who used to his nanny and is taking a tour at the museum with other nannies. Southmere tells Hattie about the microfilm inside the dinosaur just before he faints and is captured by the Chinese. Hattie then takes it upon herself, along with her nanny friends Emily (Joan Sims) and Susan (Natasha Pyne) to retrieve the important hidden document and take it to the proper authorities.

The film is based on the 1970 novel of the same name written by David Eliades and Robert Forrest Webb, but with many changes. The book took place in the 70’s in New York City while in the movie the setting is 1920’s London. The book was also intended for an adult audience and had sex and violence in it, which got taken out for the movie, which angered the authors, who later disowned the film, as they felt the plot got too ‘dummied-down and sanitized’ in an effort to appease children viewers.

The movie really has only two amusing moments. One is where the group of nannies get on the tall skeleton of the dinosaur to search for the microfilm, which from simply a visual perspective is goofy to see and most likely will elicit a few chuckles. The second is when Hayes and company steal the dinosaur on the back of a steam lorry and the spies give chase throughout the streets of foggy London, which offers some moments of humorous reaction shots from bystanders. Otherwise there isn’t much else going for it. The opening bit that supposedly takes place in China clearly has an outdoor backdrop that is a painting and looks tacky like it was done by filmmakers that really didn’t have much heart in the material and didn’t care how cheap it came-off looking. The interior lighting is dark and dingy and having the whole plot revolve around the extreme coincidence of the protagonist bumping into his childhood nanny at the most opportune time is a bit much.

The film’s main controversy, at least by today’s standards, is Ustinov’s portrayal of a Chinese spy. To his credit he at least puts more energy into it than he did as Charlie Chan in the 80’s film Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, where he seemed noticeably uncomfortable and just phoning-it-in. Yet even here nothing his character says or does is funny. The humor is intended to come from the broad caricature, which along with his sing-song sounding delivery quickly becomes tiring. Clive Revill, another white European, also gets into the Asian get-up as Quon Ustinov’s chief rival, but he proves to be just as bland. Why they needed to be Chinese at all is hard to answer as they could’ve easily been Russian, or German and might’ve been better had they taken that route.

Hayes for her part is engaging. Most people think of her as just being this sweet old lady of which she’s the perfect caricature, but here she gives her character a feisty side. I enjoyed seeing her strut, which is far funnier than anything Ustinov does and without even hardly trying. Her ordering the other nannies around like they’re on a big-time mission and her interactions with Natasha Pyne, who plays her polar opposite as this naive and fun-loving youth who approaches the whole thing as some cool diversion, are the only things that help keep it mildly watchable.

The twist ending may make it worth it to some, but overall it’s a second-rate Disney effort that’s so poorly shot and dated. I can’t imagine any kids today could get into it. It seems like the only fans of the film were simply kids back in the 70’s who saw it then and now enjoy watching again simply for nostalgic reasons, but everyone else won’t be missing much if they decide to skip it.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: July 9, 1975

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated G

Director: Robert Stevenson

Studio: Buena Vista

Available: DVD (Region 2), Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Farce, Movies Based on Novels, Movies for the Whole Family, Obscure Movies, Spy/Espionage

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The Island (1980)

Posted on March 23, 2024 | Leave a comment

island

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Journalist investigates pirate hideout.

Blair (Michael Caine) is a newspaper reporter who becomes intrigued about the reports of missing boats in the Caribbean. He gets the permission from his editor to travel down there to investigate and he takes along his 12-year-old son Justin (Jeffrey Frank). The trip proves dangerous right from the beginning when the plane they’re traveling in crashes on one of the islands when the wheels of the craft fail to operate as its trying to land. They then go on a fishing trip only to be attacked by some pirates living on an uncharted island. Justin is brainwashed by the head of the group, Nau (David Warner), to become heir while Blair is put to the task of being the resident scribe and in the process becomes the source of romantic affection to Beth (Angela Punch McGregor) whose husband he killed earlier during the attack on their fishing boat. While Blair desperately searches for an escape he becomes even more worried about his son who no longer shows any loyalty to his father and instead considers himself a descendant of the pirates.

This was another one of Caine’s ‘paycheck projects’ where he’d do the film simply on the basis of the monetary offer regardless of the script quality. He has since regretted this decision and refuses to talk about it in any of his interviews while privately labeling it the worst film of his career. The script was written by Peter Benchley and based off of his novel of the same name. Since Benchley also wrote Jaws he was for awhile deemed a hot commodity in Hollywood, but after this movie tanked his status diminished completely and he was never offered another script deal again though his 1991 novel ‘Beast’ did get adapted into a TV-movie.

The main problem is the disjointed tone that comes off at times as a thriller and at other moments a comedy. The scenes of violence, which start out right away, are completely botched. The first one has what’s clearly a mannequin put in place as the victim and thus makes the stabbing sequence unintentionally laughable. The second violent episode where the pirates raid another boat has the victims not making a single sound as they’re being hacked and thus allowing their daughter to sleep through it, but I feel men and women will definitely yell out in terror as their fighting for their lives. The third raid features one of the victims trying to take on the pirates, one-by-one, karate style, but this turns the thing into a farce and makes the pirates engaging in a weird sort of way, which saps away all the suspense.

The concept that this pirate community would be inhabiting an uncharted island for centuries and not found out is unbelievable to the extreme. They come-off like people lost in a time warp who are confused and baffled by modern technology, but they’re clearly able to get off the island whenever they want, so why wouldn’t they travel to other islands, or even the mainland where they would come into contact with the modern day civilization? Even if the whole group didn’t go there would most likely be a few who’d be curious enough to want to explore what else was out there. Having the pirates get into a time machine from the 1600’s to the modern day, or be the ghosts of pirates from long ago, as wacky as those concepts may be, would still be better than doing it the way it gets done here.

The Caine character is boring and the way he gets put on this assignment is ridiculous as his boss just tells him ‘to go’, without putting up any provisions like how long he’ll be staying, where exactly will he be traveling to, how many articles would he be writing and when would they be due, or even whether the newspaper would even be compensating him for the cost. With terms this loose a person could frolic away on some tropical vacation and his employers wouldn’t have known the difference. He’s also never shown writing anything on a notepad, or typewriter, or dictating into a tape recorder, so it barely seems like he’s a journalist at all. The idea that Caine would be the only person on the planet intrigued by these disappearances is absurd too as relatives of the victims would be demanding answers and there would be other news reporters wanting to travel there in an effort to be the first to get the ‘big scoop’.

It’s also odd that a father would choose to take his son on such a dangerous mission knowing full well that others who have traveled to this area have disappeared without a trace making it seem like he’s an  irresponsible parent. The kid also gets ‘brainwashed’ too quickly, literally overnight, making it seem like he might have some sort of mental disorder if he’s able to change personalities and allegiance that fast. The idea of putting match sticks in his eye sockets and thus not allowing him to sleep would most likely dry his eyes out and blind him instead of getting him to come onto their side and like them. The pirates are also able to do the same ‘brainwashing’ with another young girl they kidnap, but how is this primitive group so adept at child psychology in ways that modern man isn’t?

Spoiler Alert!

The ending, which features Caine annihilating the entire group via a M2 machine gun is cool though it should’ve been done in slow motion to fully accentuate the violent depravity. The subsequent chase through the dark bowels of the ship between Caine and his son and Nau where you hear the creepy splashing of the sea water hitting against the ship’s bottom isn’t bad either. Unfortunately everything that comes before is a wretched mess making it by all accounts one of the worst and most inane films I’ve ever seen.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: June 13, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 54 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael Ritchie

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD-R, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Black Comedy, Cult, Drama on the High Seas, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity

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The American Success Company (1979)

Posted on March 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

americansuccess

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Taking on different personality.

Harry (Jeff Bridges) is a highly passive man that gets routinely dominated by both his boss (Ned Beatty) and wife (Belinda Bauer), who also happens to be his boss’ daughter. Determined to change his ways he decides to emulate the personality of a local tough-guy, who always seems to get his way and most importantly get the women. He works with a local prostitute (Bianca Jagger) to improve his bedroom skills and then finally ‘introduces’ himself to both his wife and boss. Surprisingly the ‘new Harry’ works to perfection as his domineering father-in-law learns to back-off and no longer humiliates him. His wife too likes the change, but he plays the part so well she refuses to believe it’s the same person. When he tries to go back to his old self she rejects him wanting only to be with the tough guy who she insists must be a totally different person and she can only be happy if she’s with him and no one else.

Back in 1978 while filming Winter Kills, which also starred Bridges and Bauer, the funding for the project, which was through AVCO Embassy Pictures, was pulled leaving the shooting of the film only half completed. Director William Richert then decided to do this film in-between, using much of the same cast, in order to bring in the extra money he needed to complete the other one. The script was written in 1974 by Larry Cohen who intended it to be a vehicle of Peter Sellers, but at the time Sellers was in a career lull having starred in a lot of box office duds, so investors didn’t want to take a chance on it and Cohen was eventually forced to sell the script, which remained in turn-over until Richert finally decided to take it on. While the film failed to turn a profit and was barely released, Cohen often stated that the changes Richert did to the script helped ‘ruin’ it, he was still able to make enough through the selling of the distribution rights to resume the shooting of Winter Kills and get it completed.

On the whole there’s enough directorial touches to keep it engaging and Richert, who has a small role as one of the employees of the firm whose constant leering grin is great, clearly knows how to make it entertaining enough despite the story’s absurdities. The setting though of Munich, this was apparently one of the stipulations he had to agree to in order to get it made, is off-putting especially when the plot revolves around corporate America and is a satire on the American mindset. The heavy use of a white color makes the office interiors seem almost like a hospital and Ned Beatty, who was only 41 at the time, but with his hair dyed a tacky white color to come-off as an overbearing elderly man in his 70’s, doesn’t work at all. Since John Huston was also in Winter Kills and they were using the same cast from that one to do this one then he should’ve been cast in the part especially since he was really old and better at playing dominating characters.

Bridges is fun as he plays against his good-guy image. Some critics have considered him a bland actor whose characters are at times ‘too good to be true’, so having him turn around and be overly passive and downright wimpy who jumps in terror at his neighbor lady’s pet poodle is definitely amusing. However, the transition to the brazen alter ego is too quick and seamless. If he’s truly timid at heart then that trait should trickle through even when he’s pretending to be someone else, which doesn’t happen here, but should’ve. No explanation about how he gets this big colorful tattoo on his chest, which he wears while being the tough guy, nor how he’s able to remove so quickly when he goes back to being himself.

The biggest plus is Bauer, who started her career in Australia where she studied ballet and competed in beauty contests before coming to the US. Here she becomes the sole reason to watch the film as she’s not only gorgeous, but displays a delightful way of morphing from a spoiled rich girl persona, to demanding wife, and then back to submissive woman. Her accent helps enhance her character and plays off of Bridges well. The only issue is if she couldn’t stand her husband why did she marry him in the first place? This is a highly attractive women born into money, so there was no need to settle, so what was it about his original personality that she liked in order to get hitched? If she craved a more domineering man then why not go after that type of guy in the first place? The film fails to explain this crucial point and thus ultimately makes it shallow and empty-headed.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: September 28, 1979 (Test Screening)

Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: William Richert

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Obscure Movies, Romance

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Movers & Shakers (1985)

Posted on March 17, 2024 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: No ideas for script.

Joe (Walter Matthau) is a head of a large movie studio who makes a promise to a dying friend (Vincent Gardenia) that he’ll make every effort to get his concept, which is to make a movie around the title ‘Love and Sex’, made. Joe then hires struggling actor Herb (Charles Grodin) to write the script, but Herb has no idea of where to begin and seems more concerned with mending his troubled marriage with his wife (Tyne Daly). Joe then hires wacky director Sid (Bill Macy) to helm the project, but he too is devoid of any ideas and more preoccupied with his getting his young wife (Gild Radner) to go back to him.

The behind-the-scenes history of how this movie even came about is far funnier than anything you’ll actually see on the screen. It all started when Paramount Studios paid a large of sum of money for the right’s to the sex manual ‘The Joy of Sex’ because they felt the title would have a large commercial appeal. They then hired Grodin to write the script telling him it could be about anything just as long as the title of it was ‘Joy of Sex’. Grodin, like the character he plays in the movie, was at a loss of ideas, so he finally decided to base the script around his real life situation about an actor hired to write a screenplay based solely around a sexy title. When he submitted the completed script to the studio they decided to pass on it and gave the duties of writing the script around the Joy of Sex title to someone else, which later got made into a movie directed by Martha Coolidge. Meanwhile Grodin became determined to get his script made even though he could no longer used the same title since Paramount retained the rights to that. He spent 7 long years peddling the script around to all the major Hollywood studios and even a few independent ones until he finally decided to use his own money to fund it and get his actor friends to agree to be in it for as small of a pay scale as they could with Grodin himself accepting only $5,000 for his work despite being both the star and producer.

While the concept sounds funny and even novel the final product isn’t. A lot of the problem is that outside of the inciting incident nothing much happens. Everyone just sits around complaining about a lack of ideas, which soon gets quite boring and redundant. The marital spats that occur in-between, both with Grodin and his wife, but also with Macy and Radner, and even Steve Martin and Penny Marshall, who appear briefly in a cameo, is neither lively, or clever and just helps to make any already dull movie even duller. Satirizing the Hollywood studio heads isn’t exactly ground-breaking either.

I also had a hard time understanding why a big studio mogul like Matthau would want to put up a giant statue of a dinosaur in the middle of the studio backlot since it was from a movie that didn’t do well at the box office. Supposedly it was due to his friendship with the director, but to me that just didn’t jive. If the movie had done well then yes a statue was in order, but to be reminded of a flop that cost the studio money seemed very hard to imagine and too stupid to be comical. If the character’s motivations don’t make sense then it’s hard to get into the story, which is where this thing really falters.

For his part Grodin himself is quite amusing. Nobody does deadpan comedy the way he does, so his scenes still work, and there are a few humorous comments made here and there, especially by the character played by Earl Boen, but everything else just dies. The voice-over narration by Grodin, which got added later in an effort to make the movie ‘funnier’ after the responses by the initial test audiences were quite negative, doesn’t help things at all. A good movie should not have to rely on narration as everything should be conveyed by either dialogue, or action, or through other forms of visuals. Once you need narration to ‘improve it’ you already know it’s a mess.

Turning the thing into an ill-advised romance at the very end, which even includes a sappy love song, between Grodin getting back together with his wife just sinks it even further. Their fights weren’t too interesting to begin with and neither person was well-defined enough for the viewer to care what happened to them.

Grodin would later write in his autobiography of how bitter he was that the studio didn’t market the film better and the poor treatment Hollywood elites gave it, but it really is a bad movie and I think his ego got the better of him with this one. I’m a fan of his comic style and even the offbeat talk show he had during the late 90’s, which didn’t go over well with everyone and didn’t last long, but I draw the line with this. It just doesn’t work at all and can’t blame anyone for disliking it in fact I’d be very surprised if there was anyone other there, outside of Grodin of course, that did like it.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: May 3, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 20 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: William Asher

Studio: MGM/UA

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 80's Movies, Obscure Movies, Satire

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This Sweet Sickness (1977)

Posted on March 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Obsessed over childhood friend.

David (Gerard Depardieu) can’t seem to get over Lise (Dominique Laffin) who was a childhood friend of his. Now as adults Lise has married Gerard (Jacques Denis) and even had a child, but David keeps believing that she’s in-love with him and will eventually leave Gerard for him. On weekends he spends his time finishing up with a country house that he has bought, which he plans for he and Lise to live in. He repeatedly calls Lise and meets up with her in public in an effort to beg her to come back to him, but she resists while also advising him that he is mentally unwell and needs to see a psychiatrist. Meanwhile there’s also Juliette (Miou-Miou) who resides in David’s apartment building and has strong feelings for him. David is aware of her presence, but rebuffs her at every turn and yet Juliette persists. She secretly follows David to his country home and when she figures out what he’s doing the two have a confrontation.

While there’s been many movies involving stalkers and jilted ex-lovers that can’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer this one was done when stalking was still considered an isolated phenomenon and thus there’s a lot of things that work against the modern-day formula, which is what makes it fascinating to watch. For one thing it’s not approached as a thriller, or even a horror, but instead a drama. David is not perceived as threatening, but mentally confused and needing help learning to move-on. Lise does not respond in a frightened way when he approaches, but more just annoyed.

The stalker is three-dimensional as well. One of the most intriguing moments is after Lise’s husband dies in a car accident and David convinces her to come to the country home to check-it-out. Initially she acts impressed with it and gives-off the perception that she might seriously consider moving-in, but David eyes her suspiciously, which is quite revealing. He’s spent the entire time convincing himself and others that she’s truly in-love with him, but now when she actually gives him what he wants he’s not sure he can believe her. This shows subconsciously that he’s aware she doesn’t have the feelings for him like he consciously wants to believe and he actually does know the reality of the situation, but the emotional side of him just doesn’t won’t accept it.

The addition of Miou-Miou  adds another fascinating element. It brings out how stalkers aren’t the way they are simply because they may be lonely and unable to find anyone else, which then supposedly forces them to become so fixated on one person since Miou-Miou is openly interested in him and just as attractive and yet David consistently rejects her. Her stalking on him becomes just as intrusive as David’s to Lise and in some ways just as creepy. The sex scene between her and Gerard, or at least an attempted sex moment, is quite interesting because just a few years earlier the two starred in another film called Going Places. There Gerard played the aggressor who rapes Miou-Miou here though she’s the aggressive while Gerard lays virtually frigid, which shows how brilliant these two actors are that they can play such opposite people so convincingly.

Spoiler Alert!

The story was based on a novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith though there are a few key differences starting with the fact that the novel has the two in a previous, but brief relationship while in the movie they were just friends from childhood. In the book David works as a scientist and purchases the country home under an assumed identity. The Lise character is named Annabelle in the book and her husband Gerard dies after tracking David to the isolated home and getting into a fight with him where in the movie Gerard is killed when his car slides off an icy roadway. In the movie the house burns down when a drunken David knocks over a TV-set, but in the novel he simply sells it and buys a new one that’s closer to where Annabelle lives. The ending is a lot different too with the one in the movie, which takes place at a health spa, being far better and in fact it’s the most memorable moment as the scene is able to balance both an artistic and horrifying elements all at once.

Alternate Title: Tell Her That I Love Her

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: September 28, 1977

Runtime: 1 Hour 47 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Claude Miller

Studio: Filmoblic

Available: DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Foreign Films, French Films, Movies Based on Novels, Obscure Movies, Thrillers/Suspense

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Blind Date (1987)

Posted on March 10, 2024 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Don’t get her drunk!

Walter (Bruce Willis) needs a date as he’s having dinner with a very important client that he has to impress in order to get a business deal to go through. Walter’s brother Ted (Phil Hartman) sets him up with his wife’s cousin Nadia (Kim Basinger). She’s a very beautiful lady who’s just getting over a bad break-up with her possessive boyfriend David (John Larroquette). There’s only one hitch: Walter must make sure that she doesn’t drink any alcohol because if she does she’ll go ‘wild’. Walter though dismisses the warning and offers her a glass of champagne, which soon leads to a night of massive calamity.

Blake Edwards directed a lot of duds in the 80’s and I thought That’s Life and Skin Deep were two of his worst, but this one clearly beats those by a mile.  It has shades of After Hours and had this thing kept the story revolving over the happenings of one night it might’ve worked a bit better, but the second-half goes way off-kilter, which really kills the whole thing and turns it into a complete catastrophe. Screenwriter Dale Launer shouldn’t be blamed either as while his name is still on the credits the script was rewritten so may times that it shared nothing with his originally concept and he ultimately disowned it.

The problem starts right away with the whole alcohol thing as Basinger acts overly drunk after having only a few sips. Her transformation into this crazy lady is more creepy than funny like she has a split personality, or some sort of mental condition. Most guys would be running from her almost immediately and never look back and how someone could ‘fall-in-love’ with her after such obnoxious and erratic behavior defies explanation. If there was ever a bad date night this would be one. The fact that she puts up $10,000 for his bail the next day shouldn’t make-up for it like it does here and where exactly is this lady getting her hands on such quick cash anyways since she can’t afford a place of her own and must reside with others?

Willis is great when he’s the one making wise-cracks like he did in the classic TV-show ‘Moonlighting’, but playing the straight-man who simply responds to all the nuttiness happening around him doesn’t work at all. Having Basinger sober up and then Willis be the one to act zany at a later party they go doesn’t make any sense and seems more like it’s some ‘crazy personality virus’ going around or a possession of some kind that like with the cold or flu can easily transfer from one person to another.

Larroquette as the psycho boyfriend pops-in way too conveniently and becomes a bit hard to imagine how he’s able to constantly track the two down no matter where the go and the fact that his car crashes into the three different storefronts, but the front end of the vehicle remains completely intact, defies logic. His character gets neutered by adding in his parents (William Daniels, Alice Hirson) during the second act whose presence doesn’t really help propel the plot along, but instead seems to take the story in an entirely different direction. Having Larroquette defend Willis in court even though he had a lot to do with why he was in trouble and whose name was mostly likely on the police report and then to have the judge turn-out to be his own father is so outlandish that it’s beyond stupid.

This movie also has somewhat of a personal connection as I was living in L.A. in June of 1986 when it was being filmed and stood around with other pedestrians for a day to watch one of the outdoor scenes that was being shot in a nearby neighborhood. The scene that I saw being filmed comes around the 1-hour mark and entails Willis throwing a beer bottle at the rear window of Hartman’s car and smashing it. The scene took several hours to film as Edwards, who sat under the shade of an umbrella while the cast and crew and had to stand under the hot sun, seemed to be dissatisfied with every take and kept making the actors do the same bit over and over that I found it to be really boring and didn’t think there could be anything duller until of course I finally watched the finished movie, which I found to be even worse.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: March 24, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Blake Edwards

Studio: Tri Star Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Farce, Movies with Nudity, Romance

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Equus (1977)

Posted on March 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

equus1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Teen blinds six horses.

Martin (Richard Burton) is a disillusioned, middle-aged psychiatrist who gets tasked with finding out why a 17-year-old boy named Alan (Peter Firth) blinded six horses one night in a stable with a sickle. At first Alan is uncooperative during their sessions and will not speak to him and instead sings out commercial jingles repeatedly, so Martin must go to Alan’s parents (Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright) in an effort to find some answers. It is here that he learns the mother is highly religious and taught her son that ‘God sees all’ particularly when it comes to sexual transgressions. Alan though has replaced God with his obsession with horses and idolizes them instead where he essentially makes them his ‘deity’. Martin now must try to break the boy away from this fanaticism in an effort to make him ‘normal’, but realizes when he does that the kid will cease to have passion and become like Martin himself who no longer has any emotions for anything including his own wife whom he no longer shares intimate relations.

Director Sidney Lumet has always had a penchant for turning plays into a movies and with some of them he’s had great success like with 12 Angry Men, but some of his other efforts did not fare as well. This project was met initially with a lot of apprehension, but overall Lumet’s directorial flair adds a lot and cinematically it works for the most part. The effort to get away from the staginess of the story by having several scenes done outdoors, like Martin having a discussion with his friend played by Eileen Atkins, about the case while raking leaves I felt really worked. Again, with cinema you have to have the characters doing something during the dialogue even if it’s some sort of chore as there’s nothing more stagnant than talking heads in a movie. The opening sequence done over the credits is well done too as it features Martin dealing with hostile patients hitting home the point of how burnt-out with his career he is without having it told to us and the white color schemes accentuates the tone one is most likely to see in hospitals.

The controversy came with the portrayal of the horses. In the play there were performed by muscular men inside a horse costume, but for the movie Lumet decided they needed to use real animals. This is okay until it comes to the scene where they get blinded. The play version only intimates the violent act, but with the movie you actually see the sickle go right into the horses’ eyes, which is so realistically done I don’t know how they did it without hurting the animal. This was way before computer effects, so just be warned if you’re an animal lover these scenes may be too graphic to bare and could easily take some viewers out of the story to the extent they may not be able to get back into and might just turn it off altogether.

The casting is a bit problematic. Both Burton and Firth played the roles in the stage version, but by this point Firth was no longer looking like a 17-year-old, he was in fact already 23. I admire his bravery to ride a horse in the nude in one of the movie’s more memorable moments, but he still resembles adult features physically taking away the innocence of the character and the shock of how someone so young, i.e. a teen. could commit such a vicious act. Burton too looks too worn out having spent this period of his career battling alcoholism. Some may say that this fit his role, but his presence seems at times almost lifeless and like he’s just walking through his part. The segments where he speaks directly to the camera become long-winded, stagey and aren’t effective.

The story itself may not work for everyone. It was inspired by a true event, which occurred in 1954, that playwright Peter Shaffer heard about, but did not actually investigate. Instead he wanted to come up with his own hypothesis on how someone could do what this character does without learning the real reason that motivated the actual culprit. Some may find the teen’s motivation here to be interpretive and revealing while others will blow-it-off as pseudo psychology and not able to fully buy into. For example certain viewers will find the scene where the father catches the boy kneeling in front of a picture in his bedroom of a horse and ‘worshipping it’ while wearing a make-shift harness to be quite disturbing though with others this same segment may elicit a bad case of the giggles instead.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: October 14, 1977

Runtime: 2 Hour 17 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Sidney Lumet

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies with a Hospital setting, Movies with Nudity

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Without a Trace (1983)

Posted on March 4, 2024 | 1 comment

without

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Her child goes missing.

Susan (Kate Nelligan) works as a college professor while also raising her 6-year-old son Alex (Danny Corkill) as a single parent. Alex normally walks 2-blocks to his school every morning in their Brooklyn neighborhood, so Susan thinks nothing of it when she waves goodbye to him as he turns the corner towards his school while she goes the other way to her job. However, when she returns home and finds that he’s not there she begins to worry. She calls her friend Jocelyn (Stockard Channing), who has a daughter the same age as Alex, only to learn that Alex never showed up to school that day. She then immediately calls the police and Detective Al Manetti (Judd Hirsh) becomes the lead investigator in the case to find the child.

The story is loosely based on the real-life case of Etan Patz who disappeared one day while walking to school on May 25, 1979. Not only did he become the first child to appear on a milk cartoon for missing children, but it also inspired Beth Gutcheon to write a novel, which was a fictionalized account of the his case that was later purchased by producer Stanley R. Jaffe in the amount of $350,000 to turn it into a film, of which Gutcheon was hired to write the screenplay.

While the film has a riveting quality that keeps you watching it does also have a certain ‘genteel atmosphere’ that critic Leonard Maltin complained about in his review, that keeps it a bit sterile for its own good. The film acts like child abduction is almost a novelty that’s rare to happen and shocking when it does though kids can go missing each and every day in this country. The detective states that children can be sexually molested by adults though if children came forward about it they’d ‘never be believed’ or ‘taken seriously’, which is something that I think has certainly flipped the other way in this day and age. He also brings up the subject of child porn, which gets called ‘chicken porn’ here, and parents respond in a naive way to this concept, which again is something I think most adults in this era would’ve been familiar with its existence and not act like they’re being told about something completely new they had never heard about.  The police also ‘set-up-shop’ in the women’s apartment turning it into a virtual police station and remain there day-and-night for 6-weeks, which I couldn’t see happening now.

The sequence with a psychic, played by Kathleen Widdeos, I found unintentionally laughable. Her ‘visions’ are quite vague and when she gets pressed to give something specific, like the license plate number of the car, or identity of the kidnapper, she can’t. Yet the mother acts relieved when the psychic says the child is still alive, but since her ‘information’ is so nebulous she could be a con artist making it all up and no one would know the difference.

David Dukes, who plays the ex-husband and father of the child, who at this time was best known for playing the man who tried to rape Edith Bunker, in a memorable episode of the classic TV-show ‘All in the Family’ of which he received several death threats, plays the only character that shows any emotion and thus the only one who stands-out. The movie also examines the detective’s home-life, which I didn’t feel was needed. Normally I say it’s good when we learn more about a cop’s private side, but since he wasn’t the film’s protagonist I didn’t find it necessary and only helps to lengthen the film’s runtime, which was too long anyways and could’ve neatly been told in only a 90-minute time frame instead of 110 minutes.

I did come away liking Nelligan’s performance, some critics at the time labeled her as coming-off as ‘cold’, but I felt she did alright, but was kind of disappointed that Stockard Channing didn’t get the lead instead. At the time Nelligan was considered the up-and-coming star while Channing had been mostly relegated to comedy including two failed sitcoms, but in retrospect Channing has become the better known actress and proven to be highly versatile, so seeing her in the part of mother would’ve been quite interesting and she might’ve even been able to do it better.

Spoiler Alert!

My biggest beef though is with the ending, which is much different than in the actual incident. In the Patz case his body was never found and it turned into a cold case for many years before a man named Pedro Hernandez came forward in 2012 and confessed to the crime. Here though the boy gets found alive having been kidnapped to help take care of a man’s disabled adult sister, but it’s very hard to fathom how much help a 6-year-old could be expected to give an adult woman nor has there ever been in the annals of crime where a kidnapping has been done for this reason. Having the kid immediately answer the door of the home he is supposedly being ‘confined in’ hurts the tension and would’ve been more suspenseful had the police had to search the place before finally finding him hidden somewhere. Also, if the kid is able to open the front door then what’s stopping him from running out at some point and finding help?

The fact that a neighbor woman named Malvina Robbins (Louise Stubbs), who lives next door to the kidnappers and keeps calling the police about it, but they ignore her, really hurts the credibility of the Manetti character who we’re supposed to like and he’s portrayed as being ‘super dedicated’. If that’s the case then he should’ve followed-up on every single lead he could’ve even if he thought some of them might be ‘cranks’ it shouldn’t matter because you just never know. The fact that he doesn’t do this even after she calls the police hundreds of times makes it seem like a dereliction of duty who should be investigated for not  following up and certainly not some ‘hero’.

I realize most audiences want some sort of resolution and making a movie like this that doesn’t have one might prove frustrating, but in real-life a lot of cases like these don’t get resolved, or if they do the findings are a grim one. To have a movie stay realistic the whole way only to tack-on a feel-good ending does a disservice to the many parents whose missing children never come home and thus hurts it from being as insightful and compelling as it could’ve been.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: February 4, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 50 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Stanley R. Jaffe

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R, VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Obscure Movies

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