Daily Archives: February 4, 2025

In The Mood

The real-life teenager Ellsworth Sonny Wisecarver inspired outraged headlines in 1944 by running off with two older married women. Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams), this 1987 comedy about Wisecarver’s misadventures seems loosely modeled after Woody Allen’s period forays, even down to Ralph Burns’s pleasantly energetic score of big band hits. A lot of sincere effort on the part of the filmmakersincluding actors Patrick Dempsey, Talia Balsam, Beverly D’Angelo, and some veteran character players like Michael Constantine and Kathleen Freemanpays off intermittently, but the wise-guy humor gets cloying, and even the noble attempts at period ambience within a modest budget are occasionally undercut by reversions to contemporary slang. Wisecarver himself puts in a cameo appearance as a cranky postman in a mock newsreel. 99 min. (JR) Read more

The Fourth Protocol

Why is it that paranoid cold-war spy films were more numerous in the mid-80s than at any other period since the worst days of McCarthyism? Mulling this question over makes for a better use of time than sitting through this glib, repulsive thriller, another Frederick Forsyth special. Adapted from his fifth novel by Forsyth himself (who also coproduced), the picture concerns a Soviet spy who is smuggling an atomic bomb into England piece by piece while a British agent tries to track him down. Overlong, alternately nasty and tedious, with uniformly colorless and humorless characters; neither director John Mackenzie nor actors Michael Caine, Pierce Brosnan, Ned Beatty, and Joanna Cassidy can juice up the proceedings. (JR) Read more

Fatal Attraction

A profoundly uninteresting married yuppie lawyer (Michael Douglas) has a weekend affair with a profoundly uninteresting unmarried yuppie book editor (Glenn Close), who proves to be insane and makes his life a living hell. This 1987 feature gradually turns into a sort of upscale remake of The Exorcist, with female sexuality (personified by Close) taking over the part of the devil and yuppie domesticity (personified by Douglas, wife Anne Archer, and daughter Ellen Hamilton Latzen) assuming the role of innocence. While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread. With director Adrian Lyne shoving objects like a knife, a boiling pot, and an overflowing bath in the spectator’s face to signal that Something Awful’s Going to Happen, there’s little room for curiosity about the motivations of the spurned antiheroine, who eventually becomes a robotic killer. James Dearden wrote the screenplay, although producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, faced with dissatisfied preview audiences, are responsible for the totally dehumanized finale. (The original ending is now available on DVD, but I haven’t seen it.) 119 min. (JR) Read more