Movie Review: Year of the Comet (1992)

Directed by Peter Yates

Movie review by Greg Goodsell

in•sip•id, (inˈsipid), Adjective: insipid. Lacking flavor. Synonyms: Tasteless, flavorless, bland, weak, wishy-washy; Unappetizing, unpalatable. Lacking vigor or interest. Synonyms: unimaginative, uninspired, uninspiring, characterless, flat, uninteresting, lackluster, dull, drab, boring, dry, humdrum, ho-hum, monochrome, tedious, uneventful, run-of-the-mill, commonplace, pedestrian, trite, tired, hackneyed, stale, lame, wishy-washy, colorless, anemic, lifeless

Margaret Harwood (Penelope Ann Miller) is a young, industrious wine fanatic worked to the bone by her father’s rare wine company. At an exclusive wine tasting event, she meets cute with wisecracking American wastrel Oliver Plexico (Tim Daly). Finally given the chance to prove her acumen by securing a rare, $1 million dollar bottle of wine in Scotland. As fate would have it, Plexico is assigned to be her factotum on the mission and so the chance for romantic sparks fly ever upward. Ever suave and villainous Philippe (Louis Jordan) and his henchmen want that bottle as well, and so efforts to transport the flagon hit various rough patches.

Movie Review: Interiors (1978)

Directed by Woody Allen                                              

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Mama Eve (Geraldine Page) is an elegant, highly vaunted interior decorator who proves to be a handful for her husband Arthur (E. G. Marshall) and three adult daughters Renata (Diane Keaton), Flyn (Kristin Griffith) and Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Maintaining an icy façade, Eve is overbearing, manipulative and controlling. One of her chief activities is staging elaborate suicide attempts in which she knows she will be rescued at the nick of time. It comes a no surprise that papa shortly declares at the dinner table that he will be leaving Eve for a trial separation. While the delusional Eve pines for reconciliation, dad shortly arrives at the family’s seaside home with his fiancée Pearl (Maureen Stapleton). The clash is immediate from the get-go; whereas the other characters dress in limpid grays, whites and browns, Pearl is first introduced in a blood-red dress (future superstar director Joel Schumacher served as the costume designer for this film, and Woody Allen gave him a prominent credit at the beginning of the film – and for good reason.) The sassy, brassy and outspoken Pearl grates upon the clan’s nerves. As Julie Kirgo points out on in the liner notes to this Twilight Time release – 3,000 copies, snap them up quick), while it is never made evident, Pearl is implied to be Jewish, and anti-Semitic sentiment seems to bubble just beneath the surface. Eve faces the fact that she and her husband will never be reunited and high tragedy ensues – but in a surprise twist, Pearl grants life to one of the daughters in the manner of the real-life Eve.

Movie Review: Chilly Scenes of Winter (aka Head Over Heels, 1979)

Directed by Joan Micklin Silver

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

While many would come to this expecting a “rom-com,” as Julie Kirgo mentions in the liner notes to this Twilight Time release – limited to 3,000 copies, Chilly Scenes of Winter is every inch a painful “coming-of-age” comedy very much in the manner of Withnail and I (1988).

On the outside, Charles (a very young John Heard) is as white and pleasant as Salt Lake City, the place in which he works as an office drone. Scarcely underneath it all lurks dysfunction at every turn. His roommate Sam (Peter Riegert) is a perpetually unemployed “jacket salesman.”  His beyond eccentric mother’s (the great Gloria Grahame) favorite pastime is submerging in a bathtub while wearing satin gowns. Things are proceeding roughly, until Charles meets fellow office worker Laura (Mary Beth Hurt). The two meet cute, and spark a relationship, despite the fact she remains very married to a man nicknamed “Ox (the likewise great mark Metcalf, who also produced).”

After sneaking around friends and coworkers, the sensible Laura gives Charles up to get on with her life. But Charles is having none of it, starting a campaign that he thinks will make Laura leave her somewhat abusive marriage in a series of stunts that are outright stalker-ish.  It all culminates when both Charles and Sam attend an “open house” hosted by Laura and Ox in disguise as gay roommates!  Our erstwhile hero grows even less sympathetic by the minute until he too, must come to grips that he and Laura’s affair is essentially over before it began.

Movie Review: Our Man in Havana (1960, Twilight Time)

Reviewed by: Hal Astell

Set in Cuba before 'the recent revolution', it would appear from first glimpses that this just couldn't fail. Produced and directed by Carol Reed, with a screenplay by Graham Greene that was adapted from his own novel, and starring no less a Great British trio than Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson. Also credited before the title are Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs and Maureen O'Hara, hardly minor names themselves. It's as great as it ought to be, but I was seriously surprised at the content. I thought it was a spy film, and it is, but it's also a comedy which I really wasn't expecting.

Greene introduces us to the characters through humour. Guinness is Jim Wormold, a mild mannered vacuum cleaner salesman and Coward is Hawthorne, a spymaster who comes to visit him with strange questions and an offer to meet him in the gents. What he's really doing is hiring him to work for the British secret service as the title character, part of his Caribbean network, and Wormold accepts so as to be able to finance his daughter Milly's expensive equestrian dreams. Ives is a friend of Wormold's, some sort of German doctor doing research into cheese or some such, and Kovacs is the Red Vulture, a notorious Cuban official with an interest in everything and everybody, most obviously Milly.

Movie Review: 9 to 5 (1980)

Directed by Colin Higgins

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

The 1980s comedy classic 9 to 5 comes to Blu-Ray courtesy the fine folks from Twilight Time! At 37 years old, a lot of the subject matter here, such as blatant discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, seems unconscionable at this point in American history, but one must sadly admit was this was how it was in the workplace on the eve of the Reagan Administration.

To recap: freshly divorced housewife Judy (Jane Fonda) ventures back into the workplace at a large corporation, She is taken under the wing of worldly wise widow Violet (Lily Tomlin), the “gal Friday” of the repulsive Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman in the role that only could be played by Dabney Coleman) who routinely steals all her ideas and passes her over for promotion. Sassy country gal Doralee (Dolly Parton), unfairly singled out as the office “desk polisher” by her coworkers, strikes up a friendship between Violet and Judy, and over drinks, dope and barbecue share their fantasies of murdering Mr. Hart. An unfortunate series of events the following day actually lead the trio do believe they DID murder Mr. Hart. When he reappears and threatens blackmail against them, the women abduct him and begin to put their own version of “employee relations” into practice.

Movie Review: The Chase (1966)

Directed by Arthur Penn

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

The African Queen, The Bridge on the River Kwai, On the Waterfront ….Quite an impressive resume. Producer Sam Spiegel had an unbroken string of unquestioned cinema classics. Spiegel’s follow-up to Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Chase is nowhere near as widely known, in spite of a star-studded cast list under the hands of the more-than-capable director Arthur Penn, just before he was to rocket to superstardom as the helmer of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Diving into the Twilight Time Blu-Ray release (limited to 3,000 copies), these reasons become ever more apparent …

Movie Review: The Mad Magician (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

If you're going to make a movie in 1954 about a tortured artist screwed over by life, who could you possibly cast in the lead but Vincent Price? He's Don Gallico, known as Gallico the Great, but only recently as he's previously been a designer of illusions for other magicians, working for a company called Illusions, Inc. Unfortunately he's an artist, a genius even, but he's hardly a businessman. As his first show is closed down by court injunction by Ross Ormond, his own employer at Illusions, inc, he discovers that Ormond owns him and everything he creates, even when designed and made in his own time. Not much has changed in the entertainment business over the last fifty years, it seems.

Price is great here as the artist driven mad by those who seek only to exploit his genius, but then that's hardly surprising to us looking back because it's precisely what we see him as. In 1954 when this was a brand new 3D movie (and it later became the first 3D movie to be shown on television), Price was still new in the horror game. He had plenty of solid credits behind him but the first horror picture was only a year earlier in 1953. Given that it was the massively successful House of Wax about, yes, an artist driven mad, this one must have been a decent consolidation of his new reputation as a master of the macabre, and we know how that built.

Movie Review: The Keys of the Kingdom (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

I recorded The Keys of the Kingdom because it's one of those intriguing opportunities to watch Vincent Price in something other than a horror movie. One of the icons of the genre who's never less than magnetic, he came to it after a surprising number of other films which are a varied and fascinating bunch to work through. He was an important name at this point, this film released a mere month after his excellent showing in Otto Preminger's Laura and a year after The Song of Bernadette, which may explain why he's third credited amongst a strong cast, even though we don't get to see much of him: one brief early scene and he's gone for over an hour and a half. What I soon found was that he's one of the least reasons to watch this film, as a Roman Catholic bishop called Angus Mealey, who knew Fr Francis Chisholm as a young Scots lad. Fr Chisholm is who the film is all about and while we first meet him as an old man, this is the story of his life.

As the film begins in 1938, Fr Chisholm has recently returned to Tweedside, his home parish in Scotland. The monsignor has been checking him out and decides that he should retire, though the good father has different ideas. He sounds just like Gregory Peck but doesn't look remotely like him because he's plastered with some capable aging make up. I should add that nobody at the time would have recognised him anyway because he was new in Hollywood, with only a single film six months behind him, a Jacques Tourneur war picture called Days of Glory in which he played a Russian fighting the Nazis, hardly how we might imagine the typical Gregory Peck role. He's a little unlike Peck here too, with despair in his voice as he asks the monsignor to talk to Bishop Angus. Of course the monsignor has already made up his mind, at least until he heads up to bed and picks up Fr Chisholm's journal, a huge volume that goes all the way back to 1878.

Movie Review: 10 Rillington Place (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell                      

Somehow I let this feature get past me and I have no idea why. I can safely get a pass from seeing it on initial release because I was too busy being born, but it must have played on British television while I was growing up and, as a boy who had both an interest in true crime and a tendency to read the Radio Times each week to figure out what I wanted to watch (this was in the dark ages before VCRs let alone DVRs), I would surely have noticed it. After all, the address of the title is a standard trivia question in the UK. Where did John Christie commit eight murders between 1943 and 1953? That one’s a gimme. However, I find it more chilling that I’d also let the importance of what the film, and the book by journalist Ludovic Kennedy upon which it was based, has to say get by me too. Perhaps like many, I’d associated it with murders rather than hangings and it’s the latter that has more resonance. Put simply, the hanging of Timothy Evans, an innocent man, is a key reason why capital punishment was abolished in the UK.

Movie Review: Julia (1977)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Fledgling playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) is shacked up with past-his-prime hard-boiled author Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards) at his Martha's Vineyard beach retreat. Hellman is grinding away at her first play, the groundbreaking melodrama about repressed lesbianism at a girl's school “The Children's Hour.” While Hammett gives his criticism and praise to her initial efforts, Hellman drifts back to childhood revelries with her longtime friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave). The two enjoyed a wealthy, rarefied childhood full of servants and castles, but Julia had an unflappable sense of social justice at an early age. Both Lillian and Julie go their separate ways come young adulthood – Lillian, to the stage and Julie to anti-fascist resistance work in pre-Hitler Europe when fate leads to a final meet up. A secretive counter agent (Maximilian Schell) approaches Lillian to help smuggle money in a hat across the border into Berlin where she will be briefly united with Julia – the usually unflappable Lillian tenuously accepts the offer and tastes fear as she walks into highly dangerous territory as a final favor for a friend ….

Julia is grand, old-time movie entertainment packed to the rafters with Hollywood's foremost old-time leftists. Fonda, Robards and the pro-PLO Redgrave – who accepted her Best Supporting Oscar in 1977 while denouncing “Zionist hoodlums” – give it their all in a story packed full of romance, humor tragedy and a heaping helping of suspense. We know that Hellman will live to see another day, but Fonda's time on the express headed for certain death remains nonetheless remains fraught with tension. In addition, the production and attention to period detail is so lavish, those accustomed to more modern, grittier fare will be sure to exclaim, “Now, this is what a movie is all about!”

Movie Review: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

More often than not, when the late Sam Peckinpah casted actors for his films their personas emulated the tough and rebellious attitude that the director was known for. These guys (and gals) had some grit! Whether it’s Steve McQueen in The Getaway, L.Q Jones, Ernest Borgnine and William Holden in The Wild Bunch or Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs, machismo was never in doubt for any characters. Okay, I was kidding about Hoffman.

Bring Me the Head of Afredo Garcia star, Warren Oates, is definitely towards the top of the Peckinpah tough guy regulars. Here’s a man who probably ate nail sandwiches, slathered in dirt and would wash them down with motor oil -- all with a smile on his face. Even with a very slight stature Oates is so believably bad-ass. His portrayal of the lead character of “Bennie”, a hard-on-his-luck bartender looking to cash in on the bounty of the head of a dead john is truly one of the finer performances in the actor’s career (until he passed away at at 52 in 1982). Twilight Time has taken the Peckinpah classic and given a very deserving Blu-ray release with all the fixins'.

Movie Review: The Hawaiians (1970)

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Directed by Tom Gries

The first film adaptation of the sprawling James Michener novel, Hawaii was the epic of the same name in 1966 (see my previous review here). That entry concentrated on the influence of American Christian missionaries on native islanders in the early 19th Century. The Hawaiians, which followed in 1970, would concentrate on the impact of Chinese and Japanese migrants arriving in the tropical paradise at the turn of the century. Presenting a wide diorama of various cultures struggling for dominance in an enchanting land, The Hawaiians maintains an intimate narrative while thoroughly entertaining its audience.

Preeminent American screen star Charlton Heston stars as Whip Hoxworth, an irascible seaman eager to leave his business of transporting Chinese immigrants – who are essentially “indentured servants,” or “slaves” to keep the bustling island's capital of Honolulu running. Among whip's latest batch is the shrewd Mun Ki (Mako) who plans to make the at-first slovenly and unappealing “mountain girl” Nyuk Tsin (Tina Chen, the film's true star) into a first-class prostitute. But as history proves, there are lots of variables, and in short order Nyuk Tsin becomes Mun Ki's “wife.” The Hawaiians then focuses on Nyuk's journey from a hapless victim to a strong-willed, industrious woman who galvanizes the large family she starts with Mun Ki into prosperity – in spite, or perhaps because of the limitations placed upon her as a low-caste Chinese woman.

Movie Review: Inserts (1975)

Directed by John Byrum

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

In a crumbling Hollywood mansion at the height of the Depression, “Boy Wonder” (Richard Dreyfuss, fresh from Jaws that same year) a faded silent movie director who fell by the wayside with the advent of sound is grinding out porno loops to make ends meet. Alcoholic, slovenly and impotent, Boy Wonder's social circle includes former silent movie star Harlene (Veronica Cartwright, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) with a taste for smack; Rex, the Wonder Dog (Stephen Davies) his stud-for-hire not above paying lip service to those who promise him a part in pictures; Big Mac (a very young and slender Bob Hoskins), his tyrannical producer, and Miss Cake (Jessica Harper, Suspiria) a fresh-faced college girl who knows far more than she lets on.

It's a disastrous morning. Harlene dies abruptly of a heroin overdose before Dreyfus can administer the hardcore footage needed for his opus (the “inserts” of the title). While Big Mac and Rex dispose of Harlene's body, Miss Cake entices Boy Wonder to “put her in the movies.” The second hour of this two-hour film is devoted exclusively to Dreyfus and Harper's bantering, with Harper breaking a world record for continuous nudity by a mainstream actress. Everything ends horribly, with Boy Wonder literally failing to answer the knock upon the door to revamp his career.

As this wholesome synopsis suggests, Inserts was never really intended to be a barn burner with the popular movie-going public. As Julie Kirgo points out in her liner notes for this Twilight Time Blu-Ray release, limited to 3,000 copies, Inserts belongs to the sub-genre of self-loathing Hollywood epics that include such titles as Sunset Boulevard, The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon. The motion picture industry, these films proclaim, take the stuff of dreams and turn them into nightmares that prey upon the naïve and innocent.

The motion picture itself – Inserts, suffered a fate that  only Hollywood could dish out. Completed in 1975, after Dreyfuss completed Jaws – he said that he did the film to distance himself from such a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, go figure – Inserts sat on the shelf for two years and was given a limited release, slapped with an “X” rating. The film retains an NC-17 rating today. Rest assured, there's nothing the slightest bit erotic about Inserts. The porno film within the film lies uncomfortably close to a “Snuff film,” with Harlene being manhandled and nearly strangled by Rex. The malaise is thick and palpable throughout. The stuff that fuels this film's narrative has very little to do with sex and erotic fulfillment, boiling down to a war between the sexes. Audiences who lined up to see a hopefully snarky bit of naughtiness set in the 1930's were soundly turned off.  Inserts' thin plot does pay off with a cathartic ending, but it's not possible to leave this film's cramped universe – a mammoth set constructed on British sound stages that plays out in real time, with a slap and the tickle.

Very few extras this time around, this Twilight Time release has English subtitles for the hard of hearing and the film's original theatrical trailer. Inserts remains an interesting curiosity, a grimly uncompromising project on the fragility of dreams and the high cost involved in recording them for the whir of the motion picture camera. 

Movie Review: The Panic in Needle Park (Twilight Time, 1971)

When people talk about the early part of Al Pacino's career, they mention only a handful of movies. Of course The Godfather, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon are all considered classic parts of his career, but right before The Godfather arrived, Pacino played a heroin addict in a lesser remembered movie that centered around a group of addicts in an area of New York known as Needle Park.

Bobby (Pacino) is a charming scamp, full of energy and life. Honestly, scamp is the perfect word for him. He visits his artist friend Marco (Raul Julia), where he meets a lovely young woman named Helen (Kitty Winn). He is immediately enamored with Helen and decides to start a conversation that turns into a day long date of sorts. Throughout the day, Bobby shows his petty criminal side. He steals a television from the back of a van in order to pawn it. He interacts with his brother, who proudly declares how well he does robbing houses. He introduces Helen to several addict friends and other sketchy characters. Being the artistic type, she is fascinated with all of it.

Movie Review: The Happy Ending (1969, Blu-ray)

Directed by Richard Brooks

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Mary Wilson (Director Brooks' real-life wife Jean Simmons) is like so many other women in 1969 America. Married to a cheerful workaholic husband (John Forsyth) – not above mixing business with pleasure that his high-profile job brings – Wilson plunges into what diversions her suburban lifestyle can afford. Face lifts, health clubs where the gals can relax with a stiff cocktail in the back, shopping, pills (as supplied by her enabling maid, Nanette Fabray), diets … it all collides into alcoholism and drunk driving charges. Feeling stifled, she jets off to the Bahamas where she runs into her old school friend Flo (Shirley Jones), now a “professional mistress.” While soaking up the rays, she has a fling with greasy hustler Bobby Darrin, before returning home where she negotiates a not-so traditional “happy ending.”

As the ubiquitous Julie Kirgo notes in her liner notes for this Twilight Time Blu-Ray release, limited to 3,000 copies, The Happy Ending was a deeply personal project for director Brooks and wife Simmons. It was during this time, married to the difficult and much-married Brooks that Simmons admitted to a real-life problem with alcohol. A professional actor at the age of 14, her performance in this film was something of a valedictory statement for Simmons, who at the time was not yet 40 years of age. Bravely, Brooks and Simmons made sure that those who came to the film expecting an escapist, sudsy soap opera were given front row center to the gravity of the situation. During an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Simmons is taken to the hospital and graphically has her stomach pumped as hard-as-nails doctors and nurses brush her aside as “just one of those” housewives. Plowing into a police car after having one too many at an anonymous dive bar, Simmons is then forced to endure a humiliating session with detectives who threaten to film her “walk the line” attempts in court.

Movie Review: Fat City (1972, Blu-ray)

Directed by John Houston

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

In dusty, dreary Stockton, California – a blue collar 'burg where the main activity is trying to find a way out, Billy (Stacy Keach) is a former boxer, 30 years old and going on 50. Reigniting his passion to return to the ring, he meets up with a fresh-faced teen boxer Ernie (Jeff Bridges) while training . Becoming fast friends, things are looking up for awhile. Bridges marries his sweet-faced girlfriend Faye (Candy Clarke) and starts his family, while Keach falls in love with the blowsy alcoholic barfly Oma (the incredible Susan Tyrrell, nominated for Best Supporting Actress), on the rebound after her African American boyfriend (Curtis Coates) winds up cooling his jets in jail. Both Keach and Bridges are lined up for a semi-professional boxing bout – but quickly learn that victory in the ring doesn't necessarily translate to other areas.

It was with some trepidation that I saw that John Houston's classic Fat City slipped out of the envelope for me to review … but we'll get to that in a moment. As film scholars point out, Houston was fascinated with characters operating on the fringes of society and with the concept of failure. Photographed by the great Conrad Hall (The Day of the Locust, 1975), Fat City – a term used to describe a big payday after a long dry spell, plunges the audience into what is a seemingly hopeless world. But as Keach explains in a drunken haze towards the end of the film, “Before you can get rolling, your life makes a beeline to the drain.” The people who populate Fat City are in desperate straits, but yet find a reason to wake up in the morning to greet the day. 

Movie Review: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)

Directed by Woody Allen

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

It is the Edwardian Age. Academic Leopold (Jose Ferrer), a proponent of secular humanism just as tedious as any religious fundamentalist, is off to the countryside to marry the far younger Ariel (Mia Farrow). They are set to reconnoiter at Leopold’s cousin Adrian’s (Mary Steenburgen) country manor for a weekend of fun before the nuptials. Adrian’s husband Andrew (Woody Allen) is a wealthy Wall Street investor and part-time inventor who terrorizes the local wildlife with his flying bicycles. Thrown into the mix is randy Doctor Maxwell (Tony Roberts) and naughty nurse Dulcy (Julie Hagerty). The sultry summer air weaves its spell on the sextet. It appears that Andrew and Arial are going through marital troubles, inflamed by the fact that Ariel and Andrew are former lovers. Everyone wonder aloud if it’s appropriate that Arial and Leopold are set to be wed, the differences in their ages at least three decades! Maxwell, while trying to pitch and woo to everything in a skirt (“He’s never lost a patient,” Andre declares. “Made a few of them pregnant, yes!”) however, befalls a series of comic injuries.

Things come to a head when Andrew presents his latest invention, a “Spirit ball,” a device that can reach into the unseen world to see the past, present and future. The resolutely non-metaphysical group is treated to a ghostly vision of a couple meeting clandestinely at the nearby lake. There is a death – but the film has a happy ending regardless.

Movie Review: The Bounty (1984)

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

In this more “historically accurate” version of the HMS Bounty incident of the late 18th Century, Commanding Lieutenant William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) goes before court at Greenwich to face charges that he let his ship slip into mutiny. Electing his friend Fletcher Christian (a young Mel Gibson) to lead the expedition to gather breadfruits for good King George – the one who let the American colonies slip through his fingers, the Bounty sails for Tahiti. The Bounty’s mostly young crew is lacking in discipline, and Bligh is forced to resort to strict corporal discipline.

When the ship fails to navigate around Cape Horn due to inhospitable weather, the Bounty must resort to take the longer eastern route. Finally arriving in Tahiti in October of 1788, the Bounty’s crew grows dissolute drinking rum, chasing after the local Pacific Islander beauties and getting tattoos – very much like the twenty-somethings of today.

It is here that Christian fails Bligh by falling in love and conceiving a child with local orchid Mauatua (). Gathering the men for the trip back to Great Britain – after several months of luxuriating in a tropical paradise, the crew grows increasingly rebellious. Floggings and harsh disciplinary actions fail to do the trick, and when Bligh threatens to sail around Cape Horn, knowing that the harsh weather will lead to the loss of crewmate, Christian rebels and sets Bligh and his followers on a raft with minimal provisions. Aware that their actions will lead to executions back in England, the various crewmembers resort to drastic measures to cover their tracks …

Movie Review: Places in the Heart (1984)

Directed by Robert Benton

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

Edna Spalding (Sally Field, in her second Oscar win for Best Actress) is a Depression-era mother of two small children who suffers an incredible tragedy. Her sheriff husband is killed by accident in a drunken altercation with a black teenager. Justice in small town Texas in 1935 being what it is, the kid is dragged behind a truck as her husband’s body is laid out on the kitchen table prior to burial. Unable to write a check, let alone earn a living, the town’s slimy banker (Lane Smith) reminds Edna she has less than $200 saved and suggests she sell her farm, move in with relatives or put her kids in an orphanage. Edna balks at this, and sticks to her guns.

Opportunity literally comes knocking in the form of black hobo Moze (Danny Glover), who pesters her for work in exchange for a hot meal. Stealing some spoons off her table before high tailing it, a sheriff catches him, drags him before Edna and in an amazing act of compassion, she denies the charges, which sets him free. Moze proves to be a Godsend, as he has a hands-on experience in cotton farming, just the thing to turn around the unused land on her property to keep her creditors at bay.

Movie Review: Funny Lady (1975, Twilight Time)

Directed By Herbert Ross

Movie Review by Greg Goodsell

“Here, maybe this will keep you away from strange men,” Billy Rose Jimmy Caan), the harried husband of Broadway star Fanny Brice (who else -- Barbara Streisand) says as he hands her a wad of magazines to read before he departs on a business trip. “Are there any other kind?” Brice - Streisand replies without missing a beat. This is just one of the thousands of myriad pleasures had in Funny Lady, the 1975 sequel to Funny Girl in 1968, which introduced Streisand to an eternally grateful movie-going audience.

As the title implies, Funny Lady sees vaudevillian Brice as sadder and much wiser to the ways of the world. Dumped by her no-good first husband Nick Arnstein (the recently departed Omar Sharif), left with a daughter to raise alone, Brice is on shaky ground as Flo Ziegfeld closes the curtain on his latest production at the height of the Great Depression. Brash hustler Billy Rose (Caan) offers Brice his services to mount the lavish musical “Crazy Quilt” with her in the lead. An inexperienced producer, the over-produced spectacle (which includes a live buffalo!) flops terribly – until Brice wises Caan to showmanship. They retool the show, and it’s a big hit. Wedding bells ring for Brice and Rose, but life is complicated …

Where to begin? Knockout musical production numbers, lavish costumes and sets, hilarious routines – and not a misstep found anywhere. Along with Singin’ in the Rain (1951) Funny Lady can be recommended to those who don’t necessarily like musicals.