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... when they dubbed Gene Kelly's singing? He had one of the most beautiful male voices in the movies, yet in this he sounds like an 18 year old boy. He can certainly speak French with less of an American accent than one would expect from an American character, and he proves that in a scene with Michel Piccoli, where his trademark smoky voice is clearly different from the other scenes in which his speaking was dubbed.

As to the music, I like some of it, but LeGrand's compositions all sound alike to me. I can only take so much circle-of-fifths chord progression. He was a wonderful pianist and orchestrator/arranger, but I preferred him when he was doing someone else's compositions.

...but not the one made for TV with James Arness. I just finished watching this original version for perhaps the sixth time, and it always disappoints. It's a great, sprawling story of the west, mostly taking place in the final years of the great cattle drives that were brought to a close by the trans-continental railroads. But it is seriously marred by some dreadful casting. Joanne Dru is truly terrible in this, every emotion seeming utterly faked. And can I be the only one who finds Montgomery Clift totally devoid of charisma? How did he ever get to be a leading man, in this or in anything else? John Wayne is generally a wonderful actor, creating larger-than-life characters that we will always remember, but this character falls short. It's not really his fault but the screenwriter's: his single-minded determination to track down Clift's character and kill him seems as unrealistic as his sudden abandonment of it in the closing scene.

The movie is held together by some pretty good performances by some of the usual suspects, Walter Brennan, John Ireland, Noah Beery Jr., Hank Worden. The scenery is decent, but not as gorgeous as we see in many of John Ford's Monument Valley movies. The musical theme is good, but tediously overused.

In short, this movie needs a remake. It's a shame when modern actors and directors decide they want to retell an old story, pick something that was done spectacularly well the first time, and embarrass themselves--I'm sure anyone can come up with a long list of such travesties--but occasionally someone notices a film with potential, but that missed the mark the first time around. This could be just such a film.

It amazes me how easily people fall for cardboard characters. In real life, it would be impossible to find an educational institution so filled with boorish, vile teachers, and wimpish, intimidated students, with the exception of this one dazzling, inspiring professor. Real life doesn't work that way--no one is as perfect, or perfectly awful, as these people.

But that's not the point. The point is to set up superficial symbols of the prejudices of the audience (the stuffy conservative teachers, the heartlessly strict father, the violent jock), and knock them down with a feather, so that the audience can congratulate itself for its enlightened attitudes.

This is about what I'd expect from Robin Williams, who usually seems to gravitate to roles of this sort. However, other worthy actors fell into this trap, I hope only because a job's a job. Kurtwood Smith is known for playing another tough-guy father, but in "That 70s Show" he's a complex character. There, he's always threatening to "kick ass", but he's also capable of humor and love; here, he's a pathetic cartoon. But Robin Williams is also a cartoon, just of the opposite kind, a paragon of humanity who can do no wrong, but whom everyone but his rapt students believe is the devil.

How can they write stuff like this? Is this what passes for creativity in Hollywood? I watched this on TCM immediately after the old "Goodbye Mr. Chips", and as angelic as the characters in that were, they at least seemed like real people. This script is as manipulative in its own way as "Death Wish", trying to provoke the same level of rage toward the symbols of a hated culture. It makes sense when the target is the culture of thuggish gangs who rape and murder, but of prep schools? What's so awful about prep schools? I went to one of the top schools, and believe me, it was a heck of a lot more inspiring than public school. This movie is insulting junk.

when this sort of thing seemed so cool. In all fairness, I only watched the first three quarters of this movie, but that's all I could stay awake for. Does anyone find all this talk about "liberation," "inner self," and so on, at all convincing? Just about every line lacks verisimilitude. Let's back up the TiVo for a minute... "I've never been with a woman I could be so sincere with." (I need to remember that one next time I'm in a bar.) "Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war." (Heavy, dude.) "I saw your true nature when you were dancing out there." (Another good pickup line.) "I'd love you at eleven--I love you now--I will love you at a hundred." (I'll be asleep at eleven.) Is this how Henry Miller really talked? Or is it merely how Anais Nin really wrote? Even her own lines: "I've been dying to write something about it--about how necessary this book is for our times. You gave us a blood transfusion." No actress could pull such a line off gracefully, and Maria de Medeiros is no exception.

Beyond all that, how did they manage to goose this up to an NC-17 rating anyway? They must have paid someone off, for it's the only way they could have provoked any sort of buzz for this movie, and given anyone the impression that this would be worth sitting through. The sex scenes earned their classification as "erotic" primarily because everyone moves slowly, and they're filmed mostly in extreme close-up--but they weren't nearly as sexy as the shower scene in Porky's.

Finally, Fred Ward can't pull off the bald look. He looked more like a monk with a shaved pate surrounded by a ring of thick, healthy hair.

If the movie suddenly got terrific in the last half hour, then I apologize to everyone for misleading them. But I wouldn't bet on it.

I guess it's because I adore Molly Parker, and have always liked Kari Matchett in the Nero Wolfe series. Unfortunately, they had little to do with the quality of this movie. Or perhaps it's fortunate, because they don't deserve blame for this amateurish TV-quality effort. That goes squarely to Paul Gross, since he wrote the dreadful script, cast himself as the star, and did a banal job of directing. The basic idea of a movie centered around curling has promise, due to the eccentricity of the sport, and the quaintness of the culture from which it emerges. But a story like this needs someone with a much better ear for dialog behind the typewriter, and needs something better than a boring Donny Osmond clone in the lead.

I think there's a tendency to assume that the original of anything is always better than the remake, and for that assumption to bias people's viewing. But it isn't always the case--see the original Maltese Falcon with Ricardo Cortez, for instance, if you can manage to sit through it. I've seen both Farewell My Lovely and Murder My Sweet a number of times, and while the original is quite good, I find the remake to be a much improved rendition, with certain important aspects of the story fleshed out, and the plot tightened.

The most dramatic difference is the way the key to the plot is unveiled. In the original, it dawns on us gradually during the climactic scene, and we might even miss it if distracted for a moment. In this remake it hits us suddenly and powerfully as Moose Malloy quietly says, "Hi, babe." That alone is enough to score at least one extra point on the rating scale.

Also, while Dick Powell successfully made the transition from crooner to tough guy, he still never quite matched Mitchum's manliness. This isn't a great movie like Chinatown (which everyone seems to want to compare it to), but it's certainly excellent--I give it 9 out of 10.

This has the feel of a movie that was completed posthumously by incompetent editors, stitched together from two or three different films, yet John Ford (whose movies I usually love) indeed still had a pulse throughout this puzzling effort. The main thread of the story stars Richard Widmark as an Army officer, and Ricardo Montalban a bit miscast as a Cheyenne Indian, in a charmless story that can only appeal to people raised on P.C. The first part of the movie also involves Carroll Baker as a Quaker, but she disappears half way through with no explanation. The middle is interrupted by an extended scene starring Jimmy Stewart and Arthur Kennedy as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in a slapstick comedy as if from a different TV channel. Then, we're back to Richard Widmark, now accompanied by Mike Mazurki. Suddenly, they're under the command of Karl Malden playing a proto-Nazi. The message usually manages to be heavy-handed and preachy, yet at other times it's not even clear where the director's sympathies lay. And in a bid to be an Important Film, it goes on for nearly three hours. Somewhere in this tangled pile of celluloid there's a decent 100 minute movie, but I'm not quite sure where.

This is an accurately rendered story about a weak, boring man who realizes that his life doesn't matter. Unfortunately, the result is a weak, boring movie whose story doesn't matter, either. Even great actors can't manage to breath any life into these pathetic characters.

that Hollywood bothered to make this movie. It was a predictable disaster. Well, perhaps not quite a disaster, if you've never read the book, but a major disappointment if you have. Predictable, because the central point of the book is a scathing indictment of contemporary urban liberalism--and who is Hollywood full of, but contemporary urban liberals? They just couldn't bring themselves to play it straight, and instead softened every blow by turning each complex, vivid character from the book into a caricature, a mere cartoon. The result is no biting satire, just pathetic farce.

at least for the Fifties. Tense story, lots of killings, terrified witnesses, ruthless thugs. Ted de Corsia impresses as the second-in-command gangster who mutates from a steel-nerved tough into a panicking coward when things go wrong. Bogart plays what by now has become a familiar character of his, the crusading lawyer, this time as a DA trying to break a murder-for-hire ring.

It does have its flaws, however. Is it really possible that in 1951 the police didn't know what a "contract" or a "hit" was? And most of the secondary characters are basically cardboard cutouts. The climax comes too late, literally ten seconds before the ending. But the black-and-white cinematography, the shadows and the mist, the wanton spilling of blood just out of camera range, make this an effective movie nonetheless, at least visually. Worth a look.

Well, it actually presaged by one year the tendency of 50s movies to enlighten us as to the innocence of "juvenile delinquents", and the guilt of "society". Bogart gives an okay performance, but everyone else is at best TV-quality. Skip it.

This is a wonderful movie, if you like noirish mysteries. Other comments have already detailed the twists of the plot, and recognized the debt the movie owes to the noir genre in general, and to "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice" in particular. But this movie, standing on those shoulders, really does reach new heights.

Here's one telling example. In "Double Indemnity," there's a nerve-wracking scene in which Fred MacMurray is forced to confront the one witness who may expose him as the killer; this situation is inadvertently arranged by Edward G. Robinson, playing the insurance investigator, who doesn't suspect his friend MacMurray in the least. Body Heat has an analogous scene, but here the confrontation, which threatens to expose William Hurt, is orchestrated by his friends, the prosecutor and the cop, who we know already suspect him. They even offer to let him leave by the back exit, but he knows he's being tested. The tension in this scene is twice what it is in "Double Indemnity," and it's an example of the first-rate acting and direction that we see in a tight shot of Hurt's face the merest flicker of terror as he realizes the gauntlet he is about to walk.

This was Kathleen Turner's first movie role. I've never been that impressed by her acting ability, but here her limitations map perfectly onto the role of an insincere woman who pretends to be in love merely to entrap William Hurt into her scheme. I never was that fond of Lana Turner, either, but in the same way, her inability to be an utterly convincing actress was actually an advantage in conveying the phoniness and fraudulence of the conniving wife in "Postman."

But the best thing about Body Heat is the ending. Five minutes before the credits, we're sure the story is over and we're into the wrapup--after all, we've seen movies like this before--but then, in one final killer twist, everything is upended, and we see that the there is much more to this plot than we had realized. The clues had been there, but in the end, we discover that we've been as gullible as William Hurt's character, and we're bowled over by the truth that's finally revealed. This movie will leave you thinking for a long time.

This is where Jake Gittes once worked for the Los Angeles DA's office, before becoming a private eye. His job there: to do "as little as possible," because, as everyone eventually learns, everything is a mystery, and nothing is as it seems.

But now Jake is a successful PI doing "matrimonial work" for the city's elites. The wife of the city water commissioner hires him to catch her husband cheating, when suddenly the commissioner drowns under suspicious circumstances, and his supposed mistress disappears. A few twists later, Jake becomes involved with the widow, as he tries to find out what her sinister father may have to do with the case, and why everything seems to be about water.

But this is a Chinatown case, metaphorically at least. He is told quite directly that "You may think you know what's going on, but, believe me, you don't," but this warning is unheeded. Jake is good at what he does, and we can see his skill as he slowly untangles the mystery. But just like Jake, we see that at every turn the evidence has misled us, and all our intuitions were wrong. This is the story of a smart, competent man utterly confounded by events and people, leading to a tragedy that we could somehow feel coming, even if we couldn't quite see how. And all he's left with at the end are his assistant's consoling words, "Forget it, Jake, it's ... Chinatown."

This movie works on so many levels. The acting is superb, especially John Huston as the quite realistically creepy villain. The casting is inspired, with Faye Dunaway's slightly stiff acting perfectly conveying the widow's simmering neurosis. Other characters populate the scene, striking just the right notes: the two plainclothes cops, one more corrupt than the other, the fat coroner with the cigarette and cough to match, the annoying clerk at the hall of records, the Okie farmers struggling to keep their land, the Chinese servants who know more than they're telling, and even director Roman Polanski as a punk with a switchblade.

Jerry Goldsmith's music is flawless, and even the mysterious incidental sounds plucked on the harp of a piano are unforgettable. The cinematography captures the feel of 1930's Los Angeles through a slight orange filter, like a faded color photograph, the costumes and props are true, the neighborhoods seem real, and the history reflects the actual controversies of the day. The plot itself seems to wind around with all the natural grace of an octopus. This is great film-making.

... remaking a movie that has already been done so well as the Welles/Fontaine version of 1944? What was the point? This time around, they managed to drain it of all passion. The characters speak their lines with scarcely more emotion than zombies. What a dreary movie.

This is not a great movie, but it evokes a time and a place, and a style that goes along with it. A gritty 70's police drama, it takes place in a New York winter of gray skies, bare trees, wet gutters, litter and graffiti, when the crooks had no cell phones, cars smelled of vinyl and exhaust fumes, and the computer was the noisy thing that printed the suspect's rap sheet on a roll of yellow paper. The acting, it must be admitted, is routine, but Roy Scheider and the rest portray an undercover squad of calm professionals to whom danger has become routine. The story manages to be interesting, punctuated by one exciting Popeye Doyle style car chase through the Sunday streets (judging by the light traffic) and up the Taconic State Parkway, and two nerve-wracking scenes in the belly of an automatic car wash. But for all the occasional bursts of violence, it's also a quiet story of a friendship that can't withstand the temptations of crime.

This movie is mildly diverting, but it's by no means a comedy. Andrea Marcovicci's charming screen presence, and Dave Grusin's interesting music, make it palatable, but the rest of the movie is pretty heavy-handed in the message department.

We all know the story--it's become a staple of Hollywood legend, the sinister interrogators of the House Un-American Affairs Committee and the poor, victimized artists. But imagine how different contemporary attitudes about the blacklist would be had the writers been closet Nazis. Or for that matter, imagine how different the history of the world would be had all the Communists really been this nice.

The underlying controversy of the period in question was whether Communists in Hollywood used their positions to influence the content of American entertainment for the benefit of their Soviet bosses. Many would say they were just idealistic liberals, whose interest in Socialism was unrelated to their jobs as writers, directors or actors. But herein lies the irony: we're told at the end of this movie that many of the leading people involved in its making had indeed been blacklisted back in the 50's--and yet here they are making a movie whose only point is to propagandize against anti-communism. We even briefly see Communist icons Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which I suppose was excusable before ex-Soviet sources corroborated their guilt, but it reminds us of the degree to which so many were duped.

If there's nothing else on, and you really need a TV fix, then, okay, watch the movie. But don't expect to laugh, and don't expect to learn anything.

There is so much that is wrong with this movie. It's atmosphere is grim from beginning to end, for no real purpose. Harvey Keitel, a wonderful actor in certain types of movies, is almost comically miscast here. Holly Hunter, normally a very verbal actress, is called upon to keep her trap shut through the entire movie. Why is she a mute? It seems that Jane Campion is trying to make some sort of feminist point here about the silencing of women--why do feminists feel like they have to make an entire movie in order to bludgeon us with a political cliche? And there is absolutely zero chemistry between Hunter and Keitel, even as they're compelled to grope each other for the cameras.

Then there's the music. What period is this supposed to take place in? I would guess 19th century by the costumes, but Hunter's character plays the piano in a style more appropriate to a New Age street performer in Seattle than anything from that century. And it's truly bad music, adding a tinge of schizophrenia to the overall gray mood. Watching this is a truly dreary experience.

which was made in 1931 with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. Or better yet, watch His Girl Friday, which was filmed in 1940 with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (with Hildy Johnson recast as a female reporter). This 1974 version feels leaden and uninspired by comparison. Why remake a movie that has already been done beautifully--twice? Billy Wilder should have known better than to try.

I always watch these. They're fun. I have no idea what's going on. Perhaps reading the book, one could take notes and make sense of the plot, but on television, even with the miracle of the rewind button, the intricacies are buried under a thick layer of eccentric personality. In the episode I'm watching now, why is Nero Wolfe dressed like a Pilgrim? They never say. Naturally, it is expected that the genius detective be an oddball, but absolutely everyone else speaks in riddles, too. Is the writing bad? Or is it exceptionally clever? No one talks like any human being I've ever heard, but it's a pleasant diversion (albeit a vain one) to decipher the meaning behind the patter. At the end of each episode, the mystery is solved, and I have no idea how, or even sometimes what the mystery really was.

This series is also interesting in that many of the same actors appear in different roles from one episode to the next. They really ought to be credited in the IMDb listings.

Holly Hunter is skilful and charming as always, and Kiefer Sutherland is better than usual. Michael Moriarty is sufficiently different from his "Law and Order" role (the only thing from which I really know him) that I can see he's a capable actor, not just a TV character. But everyone's performance is perhaps a bit too unmodulated, with too constant a tone from start to finish. I also had trouble believing the sudden romance than blooms between Moriarty and Hunter. And the Billy Eckstine version of "Everything I Have Is Yours" that plays over the closing credits is such a clash with the flavor of the rest of the movie.

I found the ending a bit disturbing, though. I'm not giving anything away that's not already in the IMDB plot summary, but I couldn't help wondering how this odd family would make out, with a newborn that could belong either to Moriarty or Sutherland. Will they teach the child that Sutherland is the father and Moriarty as the grandfather, or that Sutherland is the half-brother and Moriarty is the father? Perhaps not a stressful as "my sister AND my daughter," but awkward nonetheless. Sounds not like the end of the story but the beginning of another one.

This is a bad movie. It wouldn't be worth saying so, except that Alan Rudolph is capable of making moderately entertaining movies (The Moderns, Mrs. Parker, Equinox), and even one very good movie (Choose Me). For a movie about people to work, the characters must either be nice or interesting--an ordinary person may charm us, and even a villain may fascinate us. But this movie has about a dozen characters, none of whom give us any reason either to like them or hate them or be interested in them. A few are given artificial eccentricities, but we can see through the false effort. They wander aimlessly through random meaningless sexual couplings in suburban Los Angeles, accompanied by an unremittingly dreary soundtrack. This is a one-note movie, in which the one note is a sour one.

There is of course no accounting for sense of humor, and I suppose there are intelligent people who will find the entire movie funny. I managed to crack a few smiles. But for those of you who find modern musicals (that is, since about West Side Story) pretentious and self-important, this movie contains a brilliant extended sendup of the genre. We've been subjected to musical Peronism, heard the Hunchback break into song, seen the Savior Himself presented as a rock star, and put up with the ridiculous chronicle of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who "sure plays a mean pinball." Well, it was only a matter of time before they got around to the Elephant Man, in a musical called "Elephant!"--with the obligatory exclamation point.

I can't remember how any of the songs go, but then I can't remember how any of the songs go in A Chorus Line either. When this happens in a real musical, one wishes for the days of Rodgers and Hart or the Gershwins. When it's a satire, it's hysterical. If in the middle of a movie about something else, they can throw together ten minutes worth of song and dialog that mimic the style so flawlessly, the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim are knocked down at least one peg. Couldn't happen to a nicer couple of guys.

Alan Rudolph has a quirky sensibility that makes all his movies worth watching once, but the pieces usually seem not to fit quite right. But this time is different. The story is well-crafted, witty, light-hearted, like a Cole Porter lyric. Cinematic cliches are confounded: we're sure someone is lying, but it's all true; a nervous breakdown seems inevitable, but she holds it together nicely; we expect a downbeat ending, but we're charmed instead. Lesley Ann Warren's usual metier is the TV movie, but it's hard to imagine someone better in this role. If other Rudolph efforts have discouraged you, try this one. It really works.

It's awfully hard to tell a story of archetypal characters without descending into stock cliches, but this movie does it deftly. In fact, it isn't just the characters that embody symbols deeply embedded in our psyches, but the surroundings too: the tenement, the church, the pool hall, the speakeasy, the jail, the electric chair. In this case, the starkness of the symbols actually heightens the power of the story. This is definitely in my all-time top ten.

if it's possible to spoil something that's already in tatters. This is a "plot script," meant to show off the cleverness of its writer, in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. For this to work, the writer must actually be clever, and the plot must make sense. This one, alas, is riddled with holes.

It also shares another fatal flaw with earlier second-raters like The Getaway (Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger) and The Silent Partner (Elliott Gould, Susannah York): even the characters we're expected to sympathize with have the moral sense of garden slugs, and no real virtues beyond the fact that they're good-looking.

Steve Martin, a dentist, has a gorgeous, charming, loving fiancée and assistant in Laura Dern, yet somehow he instantly and implausibly falls for rude, bratty, drug-addicted Helena Bonham Carter. When he discovers that she's conned him into prescribing her some drugs, he lies to cover it up. When he discovers that she's robbed his office of his entire supply of drugs and the DEA wants to know where they went, he lies to cover it up. When her psychopathic brother trashes his office, he lies to cover it up. This is the Idiot Plot Syndrome--at each move, the entire audience is cringing at the stupid mistake made by the protagonist, but each of these mistakes is essential to keep the story going, since doing the self-evidently right thing would clear up the mess and send the audience home.

Martin's childish lies eventually allow someone to frame him for murder. The cops allow an actor (Kevin Bacon), researching a role as a cop, to do the questioning. In a deus ex broken armrest, he escapes effortlessly, and immediately returns to his druggie sweetheart, even though the police are watching her.

In the end, the loving fiancée turns out to be the villainess, having hatched the whole plot in order to take ownership of his business. (A dentist office? Some motive.) She had talked his accountant into rearranging his corporate structure to make her plot possible, yet when his accountant, on the chair for some tooth drilling, began to spill the beans, it was he, not she, who insisted that the accountant shut up and submit to the nitrous oxide.

Her original idea had merely been to frame him for drug dealing, yet somehow she had had the amazing foresight to make a denture copy of his teeth, for the purpose of putting incriminating bite marks all over a dead body that only at the last moment intruded unexpectedly into her plan. In the end, she commits a second unnecessary murder, and is filmed in the act by an office video camera she knew all about. Martin, however, manages to fake his own death and abscond to France with his loser girlfriend (now miraculously cured of her addiction, and full of his child), even though it is now completely unnecessary that he run away.

I'll stop here, not because I can't think of any more flaws, but because it's pointless to do so. Maybe there's a decent Sherlock Holmes on the tube.