One of MGM’s lesser musicals (1944), about a songwriter whose scheming publisher (Basil Rathbone) is trying to break up his marriage. Director George Sidney has all the oomph and vulgarity required, but he can’t do anything about Red Skelton, who takes up way too much time and space. With Keenan Wynn, Xavier Cugat, and Esther Williams in her first starring role. 101 min. (JR) Read more
It’s the usual combo of high concept and low execution, and not even Jonathan Kaplan’s background as an exploitation director can bail him out. The various problems here include boredom and silliness. Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Drew Barrymore, and Andie MacDowell star as prostitutes who become gunfighters to defend their lives and honor, and while it’s good to see four strong women in a western for a change, it’s not much fun to encounter the hectoring sound track (bad wall-to-wall music and very loud sound effects) and find the screenwriters (Ken Friedman and Yolande Finch) feebly modeling their showdown on The Wild Bunch. But if you’re a sunset buff, this movie has at least three peachy onestwo of them orange red and the last one lemon yellow. With James Russo, James LeGros, Robert Loggia, and Dermot Mulroney. (JR) Read more
This unpretentious account of the Beatles during their first gig, in Hamburg in 1960before painter Stuart Sutcliffe (likably played by Stephen Dorff) left the group, and before Ringo Starr joined ithas been heralded as the best rockudrama since The Buddy Holly Story. It’s a distinction that it probably deserves, though the movie lacks the sensitivity and precision of Christopher Munch’s hour-long The Hours and Times (1991), which effectively cast Ian Hart in the role of John Lennon (a role he plays here as well). English director and cowriter Iain Softley seems to have little on his mind apart from filling in a bit of the Beatles’ prehistory, which includes the romance between Sutcliffe and art photographer Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee), who more or less invented the Beatle haircut and indirectly inspired the avant-garde aspirations of the group in several other respects. There’s nothing very profound here, but we do at least get a nice handling of period and milieu, and pretty good performances of the songs. With Gary Bakewell, Chris O’Neill, and Scot Williams; cowritten by Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward. (JR) Read more
I wouldn’t call this 1960 picture one of Billy Wilder’s best comediesit’s drab, sappy, and overlong at 125 minutes. But its numerous Oscarsfor best picture, direction, script, editing, and art directionindicate that many disagree with me (including the Coen brothers, who seem to have studied it for The Hudsucker Proxy, just as Wilder studied Vidor’s silent The Crowd for this). Jack Lemmon at his most hyperventilated plays an ambitious clerk who tries to get ahead by lending his apartment to executives for one-night stands, then falls in love with an elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) who’s being mistreated by his boss (Fred MacMurray). Wilder cohort I.A.L. Diamond collaborated on the script of this black-and-white ‘Scope movie; with Ray Walston and Edie Adams. (JR) Read more