Flickers in Time

My Favorite Year
Directed by Richard Benjamin
Written by Norman Steinberg and Richard Palumbo
1982/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube rental

Alan Swann: I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!

This is broad physical comedy elevated by Peter O’Toole’s brilliant pixilated performance.

The year is 1954.  The place is New York City.  It was a time when live TV comedy shows hostsd by the likes of Milton Berle and Sid Caesar entertained new television owners.

Narrator Benji Stone AKA Benjamin Steinberg (Mark-Linn Baker) has landed a  job as a junior writer on a live comedy show hosted by bumbling ego maniac ‘King’ Kaiser (Joseph Bologna).  Benji is a big fan of the films of Alan Swann (O’Toole) a star famous for his swashbuckling films (ckearly sort of a stand in for Errol Flynn).  He convinces the team to book Swann as a guest star.  Benji has a crush on co-worker K.C. Dowling (Jessica Harper).

On arrival, Swann proves himself to be a lovable but  irresponsible womanizing drunk.  He arrives seriously tardy and very drunk to his first rehearsal.  The powers that be want to cancel his appearance but Benji volunteers to keep Swann on the straight and narrow until the show.  This is much, much easier said than done.  Swann kind of adopts Benji showing him many adventures and cementing 1954 as his favorite year.  Swann panics when he discovers he will be filmed live.

There is an exception to every rule and I find O’Toole’s comic drunk quite endearing.  He is quite adept at slapstick.  This is an old-fashioned comedy and I laughed frequently.  Recommended.

The Academy nominated O’Toole for his work.

Kitty Kallen singing the top hit of 1954 live on Perry Como’s TV show

Sophie’s Choice
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
Written by Alan J. Pakula from the novel by William Styron
1982/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube (free)

Stingo: You were sent to Auschwitz because you stole a ham?
Sophie: No, I was sent to Auschwitz because they saw that I was afraid.

Meryl Streep certainly deserved her Oscar for this moving film.

The setting is Brooklyn, New York in the years following WWII.  The protagonist is a young aspiring author named Stingo (Peter McNichol( who has followed his dreams to the Big City.  He gets a room in a boarding house.  His upstairs neighbors are Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline) and his lover Polish emigree Sophie (Streep).  Nathan works at a pharmaceutical company and Sophie works as a secretary.

Nathan has fits of jealous rage in which he hurls the most horrible insults at Sophie and later at Peter.  When the fit passes he is a funny, charming eccentric once more and devoted to Sophie.  He is a Jew obsessed with the unpunished crimes of the Holocaust and Sophie is a Christian concentration camp survivor.  The three become fast friends.

As the story progresses we learn that Nathan and Sophie are hiding secrets.  Sophie’s choice is revealed as the film concludes.

It took me years to get around to this for the first time as I wasn’t looking forward to the Auschwitz content.  But it is an excellent film that I liked even better the second time.  It looks beautiful and the acting is outstanding.  Recommended.

Meryl Streep won the Best Actress Oscar. The film was nominated in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Original Score.. Kline really deserved a nod in his film debut.

Come Back to the  5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Ed Graczyk from his play
1982/US
IMDb page
First viewing/YouTube (free)

 

 

Juanita: Believin’ is so funny, isn’t it? When what you believe in doesn’t even know you exist.

A kinder, gentler version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” features an excellent mostly  all-woman cast.

The setting is a 5 and dime store/diner in a godforsaken Texas town.  The year is 1975.  A group of women are members of a James Dean fan club gathering on the 20th anniversary of his death.  James Dean has a special meeting for them as they were around when he filmed Giant (1956) nearby.  Three of them are still employed at the store.  They are proprietress Juanita (Sudie Bond), and waitresses Sissy (Cher) and Mona (Sandy Dennis).  Mona is proud to htave been chosen as the mother of Dean’s son, Jimmy.

Stella Mae (Kathy Bates) arrives from the big city with the perpetually pregnant Edna Louise (Marta Heflin) in tow.  Then an obviously rich and successful woman, Joanne (Karen Black) comes to call and puzzles the guests as to her identity.  I will leave it at that since the story relies on drunken revelations.

This is a one-set adaptation of a stage play and it shows despite Alman’s talent.  The acting is excellent.  Bates and Cher were the standouts for me, perhaps because they had the least angst to portray.  It is one of those productions where people get together and proceed to tear each other apart, shattering delusions and dreams in the process.  It goes a little too far for my taste.  One aspect requires quite a bit of suspension of the old disbelief.

Actual theme song

Chan Is Missing
Directed by Wayne Wang
Written by Isaac Cronin and Wayne Wang
1982/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/YouTube rental

Jo: This mystery is appropriately Chinese: what’s not there seems to have just as much meaning as what is there.

The first Asian-American film to receive theatrical distribution in the U.S. is this very quirky “mystery”.

The plot is a premise to hang everything more important on.  The setting is San Francisco’s Chinatown.  Jo and Steve are a father and son duo who want to start driving a taxicab.  They need to sublease a license  from an established independent operator.  They entrusted $4,000 to one Chan Hung to complete the deal.  Now Chan has been missing, along with their money, for days.

The two seek him everywhere in Chinatown . Each  of their leads has a different opinion of Chan’s character and a different theory of where he might have gone.  People discuss a dispute between carriers of the mainland and Taiwan flags in a parade.  There is also quite a bit of lighthearted philosophizing about the differences in Eastern and Western thinking.  This is accompanied by a lot of humor.

This is a charming film, something along the lines of an early Jim Jarmusch.  The amateur acting doesn’t hurt it much.  It was clearly made on a shoestring budget but revealed a considerable amount of talent.

The music is used as part of the soundtrack

Evil Under the Sun
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Written by Anthony Shaffer from a novel by Agatha Christie
1982/UK
IMDb page
First viewing/YouTube

 

Poirot: The “Arlena Stewarts” of this world do not count; their domination is of the moment. Really to count, a woman must have either goodness or brains.
Christine Redfern: You can’t actually believe that men care for either of those things, can you?
Poirot: Oh yes I do, madam.

This is perhaps the weakest of the Hercule Poirot all-star mysteries I have seen.

The setting is an exclusive Adriatic Island resort sometime in the 1930s or 1940s.  Everyone there has a few things in common and it might just as well be a country house party.  The proprietress is Daphne Castle (Maggie Smith).  Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is on a case to retrieve a priceless gem given to actress Adriana Marshall (Diana Rigg) by his client.  The jewel was substituted for a fake when she married and returned it.

Every one on the island has something against the eventual murder victim, of course.  They are a Broadway producer and his wife (James Mason and Sylvia Miles), a biographer (Roddy McDowell), a playboy and his mousey wife (Nicholas Clay and Jane Barkin) and Adriana’s husband and step daughter (Dennis Quilley and Emily Hone).

This is entertaining but the mystery fell flat for me.  I just did not care who did it.  The production values are nice.  Beautiful scenery and the costumes are wild!

The World According to Garp
Directed by George Roy Hill
Written by Steve Tesich from the novel by John Irving
1982/US
IMDb page
First viewing/YouTube rental

Roberta: I’m a hopeless romantic in a male chauvinist world.

The story is quirky and contrived but the warm heart behind all of it made me love the film.

Nurse Jenny Fields (Glenn Close) was a feminist before her time and a firm combatant against male lust.  She found the closest route to artificial insemination using a comatose soldier.  She named the baby Garp.  Garp grows up to be Robin Williams.  He had  an unconventional upbringing to say the least.

He yearns to be a real writer and falls in love with a real reader, Helen (Mary Beth Hurt).  They marry and have two adorable little boys.  Garp proves to be the ultimate family man and a critically acclaimed serious novelist.   But you can’t be forever blessed, especially in this movie.

On a separate track, Jenny writes a radical feminist manifesto which is a critical flop and a massive best seller.  She comes to run a kind of half way house for women by the sea.  Many of her followers are also Ellen Jamesians, after a girl whose tongue was cut out during a rape.  Some of these have their own tongues removed.  Another regular in the house is Roberta (John Lithgow), a transgender woman who used to play tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles.  Much more happens than I can describe here.

First off, I thought the acting in this film was really great.  Close and Lithgow are especially wonderful.  They play their unconventional characters with a sincerity that just makes you love them.  Lithgow may even outdo Dustin Hoffman as a woman.  I read the novel when it first came out and was prepared to be disappointed by the film adaptation so avoided it.  I shouldn’t have waited until now to see it.

Moonlighting
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
Written by Jerzy Skolimowski
1982/UK
IMDb page
First viewing/YouTube

Nowak: I can speak their language, this is why the boss chose for me for the job. But I don’t know what they really mean.

A decent film about strangers in a strange land.

The setting is London in December of 1981. A group of four Poles arrives at Heathrow in London. The only one of them that can speak English is Nowak (Jeremy Irons). The real purpose of the trip is to completely renovate a flat owned by their “boss”. It is arduous work on an extremely tight deadline and Nowak is a strict taskmaster. The benefit to the owner is a job done at half the going rate in Britain. At the same time, the workers will receive a year’s worth of salary for a month’s work. The entire enterprise is illegal so they must not draw attention to themselves. All the men look forward to Sundays when they can speak to their spouses back in Warsaw.

Shortly after the men arrive, the authorities impose martial law in Poland in an attempt to quash the Solidarity movement.  When Nowak finds out about this, he goes to great lengths to hide the truth from the workers.  This is difficult because telephone communication is blocked.  And Nowak is running out of money to feed the group and purchase supplies for the work.  So he tries his hand at shoplifting.

Jeremy Irons is always good and I appreciated his failure even to attempt a Polish accent.  I think the movie had a political message.  It just lacked the energy to get it across.  I had expected to love it but it dragged for me at only 97 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5KlGsYyrqE