richard-1787

Trailers notwithstanding, this is much less a movie about a civil war than a road trip movie in which we watch four not well developed characters come to terms with various difficult situations along their journey.

There is good and bad.

The best thing about this movie, to me, was the often striking cinematography. Contrasts between clear close focus and blurry distant objects that movie into the clear closer focus range abound, often very effectively. The music is also very effective at times.

The worst thing about this movie, other than an occasionally cliched line of dialogue, was the fact that we spend almost the entire movie with four characters but never learn much of anything about them. They remain largely stereotypes, some sympathetic, others annoying. (The young, self-centered woman really aggravated me.)

Warning: this is not at all the movie you might imagine it to be. It is very definitely not - at least to any extent - a parable about some battle between a Trumpian far-right anti-democracy crowd and a "good" pro-democracy crowd. That is made clear from the very start when we learn that the forces attacking the central government come primarily from Texas (conservative, Trump red) and California (liberal). We never find out why/how the president managed a third term.

Instead, this movie is about four war photo-journalists and their efforts to get to D. C. to cover the last moments of that president's power.

In the process, a LOT of photos are taken. But we never once see where these photos and others taken by photojournalists covering the war appear. Where is Reuters publishing them? Online? Are there still newspapers in this dystopia?

The movie runs less than two hours, and almost always held my attention. I'd recommend viewing it - but leave your political presuppositions at home. That's not what this movie is about.

Reviewing - which, let's be honest, means passing judgment on - this film is particularly difficult. It tells the story of how Isabel Wilkerson developed her controversial thesis that what we see as racism at the base of some white Americans' hatred of Blacks is not, in fact, a result of racism at all but rather yet another version of a willfully developed caste system, similar to what the Nazis developed in their vilification of the Jews. I find holes in parts of that argument, myself, but I don't think the validity of Wilkerson's thesis should deter anyone from seeing this movie, or appreciating the very real talent of its director, Ava Du Vernay.

If you've seen her movie Selma, you don't need me to convince you that she is a first-rate director. This movie has scene after scene that show us once again how very gifted she is. And it is because there are so many such scenes that I ranked this movie as highly as I did.

As is evident by now - March 15, 2024 - the movie had no box office appeal. I can understand that. It's almost two and a half hours long, with no "action," almost no love story, and a lot of dialogue that sounds like a well-written sociology lecture. This would be a difficult sit for most people in a movie theater, where you can't take a break without missing part of it. And there really are no "throw-away scenes." You have to pay attention to everything that is said. I just watched it at home on Amazon Prime, where I could take a few breaks, and I think that made it - at least for me - a more comfortable experience.

If, of course, you can call a movie that deals with some of the true horrors in the history of mankind's mistreatment of members of mankind anything like comfortable. There are, indeed, very difficult scenes in this movie. But they also include some of the most remarkable in the movie. The lynching that we initially see as a family picnic in the countryside on a nice day is, in its way and without a word being said to that effect, a brilliant way of showing how "the banality of evil" operated - and, let's be honest, sometimes continues to operate - in Jim Crow America.

And though the movie is already long, and certainly not fast-paced, there is one element that I wish could have been developed just a little bit more: the thoughts of the plumber who eventually decides to get to the origin of and fix the flooding of Wilkerson's mother's basement. I'm sure images of his crew going to work on that basement at the end of the movie are not given that prominence by chance. But maybe just a word or two from him later that day when he goes home to his wife and children, and takes off his MAGA cap. Maybe.

Yes, I know it's long. Yes, I know it takes its time getting to the main subject of Wilkerson's work. But it's definitely worth watching, even if only in segments. There's a lot of great filmmaking here, being used to tackle a subject that certainly did not lend itself to being turned into a film. That deserves to be seen.

I decided to watch the opening of this tonight, thinking I would halt it to go to bed early. I couldn't. It was so well made - until the last five minutes - that I could not stop watching it.

Everything is done well. The script. The acting. The direction that holds our attention once the story gets going without letting up. (Yes, the first part of the movie, before we meet Willie Stark, could have been shortened. The narrator, Jack Burden, a reporter, is never really of any interest himself, so his problems never held me. He reminded me of the narrator in The Great Gatsby.)

The last few minutes, the death scenes, seemed cliched and unworthy of the great writing that had come before.

Now, of course, in the era of Trump, it's hard not to see Stark as a populist predecessor.

I strongly recommend this movie, There are shades of Citizen Kane and Keeper of the Flame, certainly, but this movie stands on its own as a great motion picture, produced by Hollywood moguls, most of them Jewish refugees, who were intent on warning American audiences that what they had fled in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere could happen here as well.

As indeed it can.

I first discovered Ronald Colman - or rather, more specifically, his voice and the wonderful ways that he used it - some six decades ago when I saw him as Sidney Carton in *A Tale of Two Cities*. Since then, I have enjoyed him - if not necessarily the movies he appeared in - often. (*Kismet*, for example, is a real disappointment, though he in it is not.)

So, I was eager to see him in this, his Academy Award-winning role. And to see how he would play scenes from *Othello*.

Better I should have gone to bed early.

Setting completely aside the issue of a white actor playing Othello in blackface - which I can do easily because I'm not Black - I confess that I was mostly disappointed in his performance on stage as Othello. The voice didn't have the force and presence I wanted, it was not commanding where Othello needs to be great.

This was especially true, for me, in the long excerpt from Act V that we see early in the movie, part of the opening night performance.

Later, sometimes, I found more of what I wanted.

The TCM host, Ben Mankiewiecz, said that the scenes from the play were filmed not in the order they appear in the movie, but rather in the order they appear in the play. That may be, but I hope it's not true, because I consoled myself with the idea that Colman - and no doubt the director, George Cukor - wanted to show a progression in Johns' acting as he did the play over and over through the production's 300+ nights. I found the last time we see Othello's death scene to be more powerful than the first time, much earlier in the picture.

As for the rest of the picture, I found it average at best. Its depiction of mental illness, though perhaps up to date for its time, was out of date and rather aggravating in 2024. I found NO chemistry between Colman and his leading lady, making it hard to believe the two characters still loved each other.

So I would pass on this movie, and see no reason to watch it again in the future.

The previous 30 reviews focus on Lanza's singing - glorious to my ears - and the historical inaccuracy of the script - yes, it's pure hokum, full of clichés that were old even in 1951.

Yes, Lanza is sometimes sloppy in the operatic arias. But even there - especially there, actually - his diction is crystal clear, and he clearly knew what he was singing about. In the popular songs - Because, Mattinata, etc. - he's a unadulterated joy to listen to. A big, full voice, with warmth and life.

My major problem with this movie - and I've seen it several times now, over the years - is the casting of Dorothy Kirsten in what is, despite the billing, the real female lead. She was an ok, by-the-books singer, but her voice sounds so pale next to Lanza's. And her acting is certainly nothing to write home about.

I wish, instead, that MGM had found another singer for that role. She really flattens every scene she appears in.

I understand MGM would have wanted someone with clear English. She should also have had something of Lanza's life and fire, totally lacking in Kirsten. Ideal but unavailable would have been someone like Rosa Ponselle, who had retired 15 years before, or Grace Moore, who had been killed in a plane crash just a few years before. Roberta Peters, lively and vivacious, might have worked, though some of the numbers would have to have been changed for her. No Aida, for example. Or perhaps Patrice Munsel, with the same caveat. Perhaps even an older American soprano who took a motherly interest in Caruso, since there is not supposed to be any romantic connection. Then perhaps Ponselle could have been coaxed out of retirement. She was only 54 in 1951.

But someone other than Kirsten.

This is in many ways a traditional movie. No, not like *Goodbye Mr. Chips*, but still fairly traditional. From early on, when we see that the teacher, the cafeteria head, and the troubled student will be stuck together for Christmas break, we can guess that the rest of the movie will be about how each of them helps the other two deal with their personal problems.

And that's what happens for the remainder of the movie.

There are certainly unexpected twists and character reveals that are nicely done and not forced. That is what holds our attention with the two main characters. So it is a shame we don't learn more about the woman.

The movie suggests, for awhile, the modern idea that families don't have to be biological, but can be constructed. I would have liked to have seen more of that.

Otherwise, the dialogue was good and the acting fine to very fine.

I'd certainly recommend seeing it, but I can't imagine seeing it a second time. It leaves me with no questions, and nothing to talk about, unlike, say, Oppenheimer or American Fiction.

I can't imagine going to any movie without knowing in advance what it was about. Movie tickets are too expensive, and there are too many types of movies I don't care for, for me to go at random. A fair number of the really negative previous reviews, however, seem to have been the result of people going and expecting something very different, or going without knowing what this movie does. I can understand that those people might have been disappointed, but the movie was not meant for them, and they did choose to go in ignorance.

As various previous reviewers have explained, this movie is a view of what life near a death camp might have been like for Germans who were indifferent to what was happening to the Jews (and other persecuted minorities) during the War. They simply went about their lives, trying as best they could to make something good of them despite growing shortages, occasional Allied bombings, etc. (This movie evidently takes place in 1942 or 43, so before the Allied bombings and the shortages really became severe.) The wife of the camp commander is so indifferent to what is starting to go on in the camp she can see just the other side of her garden wall that when her husband is transferred, she chooses to remain in their nice house, with its garden, rather than take advantage of that chance to leave. Her choice is not evil - it hurts no one, unlike the daily actions of her husband the camp commandant - but it is certainly a stellar example of indifference to human suffering.

There is never any discussion of the moral issues at hand. Near the end, Höss appears to vomit after leaving a meeting where the Final Solution is discussed, but we don't know why.

I didn't care for the end - which I will not recount so as not to spoil it - and would rather the movie had ended before the switch to modern times. Previous reviewers have discussed what that switch might have been intended to suggest, but to me it broke the effect of what had come before to no valid purpose.

As I thought about the movie during dinner after seeing it, I too, like some of the previous reviewers here, came to the conclusion that it had made its point fairly early on. After awhile I didn't see that it was adding anything as we continued to follow the family though their pleasant but uninteresting lives in the shadow of the death camp.

I also found the younger children's indifference to what was going on literally next door to be hard to accept. Not that everything else in this movie is realistic.

So, for me, an interesting idea that wore out its welcome before the movie had ended.

I'm not going to summarize the story of this movie; you can find that above.

Rather, I'll just leave my comments on the experience of watching it.

The ;movie is well acted throughout. And that can, at times, make it difficult to watch. When one of the characters is killed, it is difficult to watch his mother's at first unbelieving reaction to the tragedy. You feel something of her grief just in watching the contorsions of her face and body. It's not easy to watch.

Later, watching the police dept intimidate witnesses to avoid a wrongful homicide verdict is also difficult to watch, but in a different sense. You see how powerless the people in this poor neighborhood are to fight back against such administrative corruption. (I also suppose it doesn't make a lot of sense. I would imagine, though I don't know this as a fact, that even in 1975 police depts would have been insured against such expenses.)

It's refreshing that it is a Black lawyer who wins this suit, and not some Great White Savior.

But at the end, you have no assurance that the same thing won't happen again. And again. And again. The shooting of the young Black man was not directly an act of racism - one of the policemen who shot at him was Black himself, and they had been told the rapist they were pursuing was Black. His death is, rather, the result of sloppy procedure and very bad coincidence.

But the intimidation of the potential witnesses by police dept reps suggests that the people in this neighborhood and other poor ones like it have little access to real justice.

Harlow and Gable made six movies together, all but the first as the leads. This is certainly not the best known, or the best, of them. The first part is them sparring as two hardened characters, something they would do better in subsequent films.

But I found the last part interesting, when the other women in Harlow's room at the reform school work together to help her marry Gable-and thereby make her yet-to-be-born child legitimate. (That may not be a big deal today, when movie and sports stars have children "out of wedlock," as they used to say, all the time, but back in 1933 it was indeed a big deal. The characters usually stop in mid-sentence rather than mention that Harlow's character is pregnant.) The several women are allowed to become individuals, not just prison-hardened clichés, and individuals with courage and a willingness to sacrifice what little they have for someone else's benefit.

In the same respect, the treatment of the Black preacher, which could have been played for comedy, gives him a certain dignity and likability, even though he had been presented earlier as very moralistic.

All this from a director, Sam Wood, who would later be known for his right-wing politics-but also some very good movies (Good-bye Mr. Chips, King's Row, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc.)

These things don't make this a great movie. But they made the last part of it very interesting, at least for me.

I went to see this movie for a second time today. In part because I enjoyed it so much the first time, in part because I had questions about it that required a second viewing.

Overall, I really think it's a wonderful movie, well-acted throughout.

But, as some previous viewers have remarked, it is almost two separate movies: the story of the Ellison family going through emotionally hard times, and Monk's decision to take on the "serious" fiction publishing establishment to show just how superficial they are when it comes to their publication of novels by and about Blacks.

There is a connection, yes: Monk convinces himself to publish a trash Blacksploitation novel in part by saying that he needs the money to take care of his mother, who is entering into dementia. But lots of great writers have written "easy" potboilers for money when their serious fiction wasn't making any. It would have been easy to assuage his conscience on that issue - as Sintara Golden evidently has - without developing the extensive family issues. Monk's agonizing about "selling out" is one of the least convincing parts of the movie, at least to me.

Those family issues are well developed, and often beautifully acted and filmed. But that does not mean they are really essential to what sets this movie apart as different and particularly interesting, at least as I see it.

So I would have cut back significantly on the family issues --perhaps even to the point of eliminating the sister Lisa's character, though she is well played by Tracee Ellis Ross -- so as to be able to develop the other aspect of the movie in two hours.

And there is lots that could be developed there. For example:

Where does Monk get a knowledge of urban Black English -- or at least what middle-class Americans imagine to be such -- if he grew up in an upper-middle-class family with a beautiful home and attended Harvard? We get an inkling of what might have been when we see him in bed watching a Blacksploitation movie for a minute or two, but this could have been developed into a significant, and funny, part of the movie. How would an upper-middle-class Black academic with an upper-middle-class upbringing go about learning "the lingo" well enough to fake out not just over-educated middle-class white readers, but also intelligent Black readers like Coraline? There could even have been talk of his trying to find his "roots," which urban ghetto life was not, tied in with the the fact that Leslie Uggams had starred in that series.

I would also like to have seen Sintara Golden's character developed further. She's obviously an intelligent woman, and in her scene with Monk during the Literary Prize committee lunch break we see her admit that she wrote her "ghetto" work to appeal to liberal white readers. But was that compromise easy for her? She says she did a lot of research. What sort of research?

She also catches Monk off-guard when he talks to her about "the potential" of Black people, which she says shows that he doesn't really believe that they have achieved anything of true value yet. This could be tied into the sort of fiction he has been writing so far. There isn't much to go on there, but his agent refers to his most recent novel as "the Persians" and Coraline says she has read his book "The Frogs." Has he been adapting Classical models to tell modern stories, like Eugene O'Neill? (We learn from the novel *Erasure* that that was indeed the case.) Does part of his feeling of insufficiency stem from interiorized anti-Black racism? There's little to go on in the movie as it now stands, but that might be a theme to develop. Sintara is intelligent and attractive; he could be attracted to her for all sorts of reasons, see in her both someone he dislikes because she is willing to sell out -- but why is that such a bad thing, as his agent asks him with the Johnny Walker bottles? -- and someone who is more comfortable being Black -- whatever that means to her -- despite her elite education.

And then there is the issue of the movie script Monk finally gives to the superficial movie producer, Valdespino. Why was the latter willing to abandon Monk's trash novel, which was evidently about life in the ghetto, for a story that ends with a tuxedoed man receiving a literary award? Valdespino's choice of endings is deeply cynical, and not stupid. But why did he make the switch, and what to? (In *Erasure* this switch doesn't take place. But in fact the movie deal is much less important in the novel, and does not lead to the end of the story, one of the particularly brilliant innovations created by the movie screenwriters for *American Fiction*.)

There are also hints at potentially interesting things that are introduced but then abandoned. When Monk starts to write his trash novel, he is sitting in a room surrounded by prints of Gauguin paintings. The young thug he creates, with the eye patch and the dew rag, is named Van Go. Why all those references to late 19th century French post-impressionist art?

When Monk first returns to Boston and visits the family home, the house-keeper, Lorena, tells him that he's not overweight, and that "back in Arkansas he'd be a beauty queen." A strange thing to say about an apparently straight man. But then, when Cliff arrives near the end of the film with two young boyfriends, we see that Lorena is not bothered by homosexuality at all. What does Lorena know, or think she knows, about Monk's past?

Again, this is a very good movie just as it is, and well worth watching. I guess it's a tribute to it that it kept me thinking long after I left the theater, considering how the already very good in it could have been developed even further.

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I was sufficiently intrigued by this film to go out and read the novel, *Erasure*, on which it is based. I was convinced that the novel would focus more on the critique of racism in the American publishing establishment, and that the family drama that several reviewers found less interesting would be much less important.

I was very wrong. If anything, the movie develops the critique of the publishing world, and often very cleverly. The three-part ending of the movie is completely new with the film. So is what development we see of Sintara Gooden's character. We never really meet her in the novel, and there is no discussion at all between her and Ellison. She is not on the five-person literary award panel of judges. Putting her on it, and thereby giving us even what little discussion there is between her and Ellison, was another great script writer innovation.

There are many other major differences as well, which probably explains why the film was titled American Fiction and not Erasure.

So, if this movie can make so many changes in riffing off the novel original, I will hope that a short tv series -- with the same actors, who are uniformly good -- will pick up from here and go on to explore some of the issues raised by the book and the movie.

This for me very unsatisfying movie seemed to change viewpoints half-way through. Most of it is just tepid fluff, but on occasion in the first part the magazine editor, played by Montgomery, makes a few short speeches about bringing down vapid politicians like the would-be one played by E E Horton, and big money, like Horton's soon-to-be father-in-law, Kennicutt. In that sense he sounds like a humorless version of Clark Gable's newspaper reporter in "It Happened One Night", which had been released just the year before. Most Americans were suffering through the Depression by 1935, when this picture came out, so there was a ready market for criticism of the wealthy, who continued to enjoy life while the rest struggled to keep their heads above water.

But as the picture goes on, Montgomery's character sounds angrier and angrier about this. And our way of viewing his anger is changed by Harding's character, who tells him that, while she originally saw him as a crusader, she now sees him as wanting to persecute the wealthy.

From that point on, Montgomery's character is presented as some sort of closet Communist because his father was killed by strike-breakers during a coal miners' labor unrest. And Harding's character, who has lived among the wealthy, does not want anything to do with that. The very ambiguous final scene leaves us up in the air on whether she will accept him as she has grown to see him - and told us to see him.

But how many in the audience would care? There is absolutely NO chemistry between Harding and Montgomery, none whatsoever. It does not help that she is made up to look much older than he, whereas in fact Harding only had two years on her costar.

In the same respect, she comes off as so understated in this movie that we cannot believe she had torrid affairs with many famous men. She really seems almost sexless.

There are minor faults as well, such as the Tennessee accents. The leads, except for Montgomery, are all supposed to be from the Volunteer State, and on occasion each attempts a slight Southern accent. But then it vanishes completely.

I got nothing out of this movie other than the occasional pleasure of Harding's voice when she spoke softly. That was really very beautiful.

The rest just became aggravating.

None of the previous reviewers seem to have put this short in historical context. It was produced and shown in 1943, when things were still going badly for us in the war. Europe was still occupied by the Fascists. The Europe of almost every composer on those risers: Beethoven, Wagner - Hitler's favorite -, Brahms, Paganini, Schubert, LIzst, etc.

And yet their place as the great masters of music is never called into question.

There is more to this short than meets the eye. MGM bothered to hire musicians who could compose versions of the American's song that are really in the styles of the various composers mentioned. A lot more work was done here than for the average short. So yes, this short didn't win that Oscar just by chance.

This is propaganda in the good sense, and that would not have been lost on moviegoers of the time.

I saw this movie this afternoon - Saturday afternoon - and there were only three people in the hall. I was not surprised.

Freud's Last Session is part of a cottage movie genre, almost always taken from a Broadway play, where two-man shows are relatively common. The author puts two historical figures together in a room and lets them debate various important issues for close to two hours. Nixon/Frost is the one I remember offhand, but there have been others as well. In the theater - a small theater - I can see this working well. I'm not sure how it works as a movie, or more to the point: for whom it works. Movies, even modest ones like this, cost a LOT more to produce than plays. Can something like this recoup the investment?

Yes, the two actors give very fine performances. People go to see Shakespeare plays not to see what will happen to Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. They already know before they enter the theater. They go to see how the actors will deliver the lines.

But here, unlike in Shakespeare, the lines are not particularly striking. Hopkins in particular did a great job of creating the character Freud, but he didn't have Shakespeare's words - or even, say, those of the playwright who wrote The Lion in Winter - to work with.

So I'm left with my initial question: how many people are going to pay to see Hopkins and Goode deliver their uninspired lines? And will that make enough ticket sales to at least break even on this movie?

I enjoyed it, yes, but I found that it was too much of the same thing for too long, and would have been happier if it had been shorter.

This movie is not at all what I imagined from the trailer , which suggests a satire of the Bible's story of Jesus' last days. There is some of that here , but not much, and it's very uneven in quality. I was impressed by the parody of da Vinci's depiction of the Last Summer but left cold by much of the rest. The cleansing of Jesus, where a dirty beggar is transformed into the very white and scrawny Christ we know from endless depictions was interesting but needed development.

Then we get to Good Friday and an altered presentation of the Crucifixion on the Mount. Things very quickly become serious and remain so until the end of the movie. Clarence's crucifixion is presented in realistic detail, as is his suffering He has a discussion with the white Jesus on another cross, and it's very serious.

And then he dies

And is brought back to life on Sunday, but not by the pale white Jesus

Don't look for laughs in any of that.

I'll have to watch this a second time to see what I think it is trying to say.

I went to see MIgration this evening because I had been stuck in the house for several days with a bad head cold and wanted to get out. I had seen the big hits at the local cinemaplex, so I was left with a few horror films that didn't tempt me at all and this, Migration.

I found most of it pleasant but uninteresting. I was mildly aggravated by the dad character who had no sense of imagination, at least to begin with. I was surprised there wasn't a scene where he refused to ask for directions and got them all lost.

The one episode that mildly bothered me was the one with the pigeons in New York City. Dad starts by calling them dirty vermin. (He learns later to have respect for at least one of them.) They speak with what sounds like an urban, i.e. Urban Black accent. Why?

I have no idea.

But I didn't care for that element of that episode.

As a previous reviewer observed, this movie is more about the dynamics of a particular family than wrestling. Which was fine with me, as I have no interest in what is called "professional" i.e., scripted wrestling, which is more spectacle than sport.

How the matches are sketched out in advance is not the subject of this movie. We see one brief example of this, but nothing more.

Rather, this is the story of the von Erich family. The father had a mildly successful career in professional wrestling. When his day is over, he convinces all four of his sons to follow in his footsteps, even though some of them would rather do other things. Dad keeps pushing them until they fall apart, in one way or the other.

I have no idea how close to the historical reality this movie is, and don't care. For the facts, I would turn to documentaries or books, neither of which this pretends to be.

I had hoped that it would be a good drama. For me, it was not. I found the characters to be emotionally flat. And there are many unanswered questions, that might have made the four boys' faithful devotion to their emotionless and manipulative dad easier to understand.

The fact that none of these four healthy young men had any real interest in women - or men - seemed strange.

One point left me particularly puzzled. Near the end of the movie, when Kevin is in bed with his wife one morning, their two largely androgenous young children run in and hop in bed with them . The mother calls them "girls." Later, when they are playing football with Kevin, he refers to them as boys. They both have long blond hair and could be either. What gives? What was the director up to?

If you're a wrestling fan, you'll probably be bothered by the lack of fidelity to the historical facts. If you're not, I don't know why this would interest you, as the characters aren't that interesting.

Unless you want to spend two hours looking at muscular guys in their briefs.

I can't believe that I get to write the first IMDB review of this stupendous movie.

Everything, but everything, is good when not downright great here.

The script is always interesting.

The realization of that script is good and sometimes just downright astounding. The staging of some of the musical numbers is pure genious: imaginative, fast-paced, colorful. But there is plenty of variety. The end of the movie starts off simply enough, but grows and swells to become very, very powerful.

The acting by the leads is all first-rate. How they convinced the men to play those often despicable roles I don't know, but you surely cheer when their women finally stand up to them. Some of those moments got applause from the audience where I saw it. (Note: I was almost the only man in the sold-out theater.)

It isn't a short movie, but, as with the only other movie this year that rises to its level, Oppenheimer, I was not bored for one minute.

Go see this movie. Order your tickets in advance, because this is going to sell a LOT of tickets. But go. It will take you through a wild emotional roller coaster. There are moments that are very hard to watch. (This is not a movie for little children.) But everything here is well done, and often superbly done. It will restore your faith in movie making.

This movie is less than two hours long. I would have sworn it was almost three. It drags something awful. How could the same director who had just previously made "Going My Way" and the less inspired but still enjoyable "Bells of St. Mary's" have allowed his actors to deliver such leaden performances?

And who approved this script??? There isn't an ounce of humor in it. Gary Cooper's character is not nice so much as just plain dull and stupid. It's as if he wears a sign that says "Kick me" on his back and really means it.

Ann Sheridan's character, who should be the center of reason here, is presented as materialistic, more interested in shoes and dresses than her family. It makes it harder for us to sympathize with her.

Everything here falls flat. What previous reviewers who found this funny found to laugh at I honestly cannot guess.

If you want to watch a Leo McCarey films, there are some great ones to pick from. But avoid this. And if you do start it, don't tell yourself "It has to get better." It never does.

Like for many of my generation - I was born in the early 1950s - Leonard Bernstein was known as the handsome, dynamic young American who tried to make classical music accessible to children of all backgrounds across the nation with his televised version of the New York Philharmonic's *Young People's Concerts*. (Walter Damrosch had done the same thing on radio a generation before for my mother's generation, but that were very different. Damrosch was European with a German accent. Bernstein, though the son of Russian immigrants, was all American - even if, as the movie suggests in one fast sentence, Bernstein started with such an accent himself and then worked to divest himself of it.) The man we saw on tv, and the imagine built up around him, is not to be found in this movie about a flamboyant, insecure, and self-centered individual who is too often weak to others' detriment as well as to his own. If you are looking for the Bernstein of your childhood, don't expect to find him here.

Nor, from what I understand, should you look for the facts of his life here. This isn't a documentary, and doesn't pretend to be one. So I don't understand previous negative reviewers who fault the movie for not being historically faithful. Evidently it is not.

But then, what is this movie about? As presented here, it's the story of a gay artist who, for reasons never made clear, allows himself to become married to a young and not particularly tolerant actress, and then has to spend the years of his marriage hiding his gay life not only from the public at large - which was the case for most gay artists of his generation and before - but also from his own children. This movie never explores why he did this.

Nor does it consider contemporary cases of the same thing. The most obvious would be Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic just before Bernstein, who was also gay but who never married. It's strange that Bernstein never for a moment in this movie refers to him as a possible model in that respect.

Nor does it really consider why actress Felicia Montalegri would have convinced him to marry her. She has a line about the smell of Bernstein reminding her of the smell of her father's coat, and that she associated that smell with security. But we don't know why she felt insecure without him - if she did - nor why she would enter into such a mariage, which was unlikely to provide emotional security.

In short, the two main characters' motives for marrying are never really explored.

At one point, near the end of the movie, there is an extended scene between the two in which, among other things, she blames him for not being honest with himself and developing his gifs, which she evidently saw to be his composing. But then, shortly afterward, when he talks about telling his teenage daughter that he is gay, she tells him he can't do that. So he should be free of what others do to limit him, but not free from what she does to limit him? The script, the character development, is often similarly muddled.

I didn't expect to learn anything new about Bernstein's artistic life from this movie. That's now how it's being presented. But I didn't learn anything about why he allowed himself to have such a complicated personal life, either. And that is what the movie would seem to exist to present to us.

So, what did I get out of this movie? Not much, to be honest.

Would this movie be of interest to those not already familiar with Bernstein's musical career? Probably not. Especially in the early, black and white part, there is a LOT of name-dropping of people in the New York arts scene in the 40s and 50s. Aaron Copland, Jerome Robbins, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, etc. That would shut such viewers out altogether.

If Bradley Cooper made this to discuss the life of a gay man trapped in a homophobic straight world, he would have been better of doing what the producers of Tár did: create a fictional conductor who resembled Bernstein in some ways but not others, and then created his situations and characters accordingly. Pegging this situation to one recent musician whom so many potential audience members feel they knew just created openings for distracting criticism and limited - but not too much - what he could do with his material.

As it stands, I don't understand what he wanted us to get out of it, and don't see how it will attract many viewers that stick with it to the end.

I very much like Stewart and Colbert, so I stuck with this until the end. But it was not enjoyable. Not at all. The script is truly awful, full of ludicrous dialogue and ridiculous situations. The two main characters are both downright dislikable. I can't see what MGM saw in it, and I don't understand why they chose to put two major stars in it. Colbert's character is constantly making a mess of things and then whimpering in a most annoying way. Stewart's character takes a huge risk without anything solid to go on. Guy Kibbee's character puts up with a lot of physical mistreatment. In fact, for what is supposedly a romantic comedy , there is a lot of violence here

My recommendation: avoid it.

In 1940, RKO brought out My Favorite Wife with one of their big stars, Irene Dunne, and two great male leads, Gary Grant and Randolph Scott. It's about a man (Grant), an apparent widower, who marries a woman because he believes his first wife (Dunne) died while on an expedition to the Pacific some seven years before. In fact, Dunne had spent those seven years on an island with another man (Scott), but claims that she was not unfaithful to Grant with Randolph. Grant spends most of the movie trying not very hard at all to explain the situation to his new wife, with whom we are to imagine that he has not had conjugal relations. There are some funny scenes, but it stretches things out far too long, and has other weaknesses.

Two Many Husbands, released by rival studio Columbia in that same year, is centered around one of their big female stars, Jean Arthur, who marries a man (Melvyn Douglas), because she believes, after only six months, that her first husband (Fred MacMurray), was lost in Africa. Complications ensure, more or less, as Arthur tries - but not very hard - to choose which man she wants to be married to.

MFW has a weak script, but the one for this movie is a lot weaker still. As is the direction by Wesley Ruggles.

There's nothing particularly wrong about this movie, but it doesn't have much pep, and the end is a real copout. Paramount's Design for Living (1934), based on a play by Noel Coward with Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper, and Frederick March, dealt with a similar situation much better.

In the end, I prefer Irene Dunne to Jean Arthur and Cary Grant to Fred MacMurray, so TMH seemed that much weaker to me.

On another hand, I found it interesting how both TMH and MFW flirted with homosexual innuendos in the depiction of the two men's plight, even though the Hayes Code was in force by then.

All six actors made much better movies, and had much better scripts, elsewhere.

This movie must have cost a fortune to make. (There is no budget listed yet here on IMDB.) You would think they could have spent a little of it on a good script. So many of the problems here stem from the bad script, which does not provide clues about what it going on.

What we get is several large-scale but very unexciting battle scenes, where we watch the infantry march into suicidal battle, sometimes led by the cavalry, sometimes followed. In a movie about a fabled tactician, there is no discussion of what made him a success, what he did differently, etc.

In between the battle episodes are some of the least romantic, un-erotic love scenes ever filmed. Phoenix and his leading lady have absolutely NO chemistry whatsoever. Half the time he is like a statue with her, the other half like an over-eager dog. We never get a hint of what he might see in her.

I stayed through the whole 2.5 hours because I was with friends. Otherwise I would have left mid-way through, or fallen asleep - as Napoleon does several times himself during the battle scenes.

I saw Oppenheimer, which is a full three hours long, three times last summer, and was riveted to it all three times. That movie was well directed. This movie didn't hold me at all, had no pacing, and was sometimes confusing even though I have studied that period of French history.

Some will find fault with historical inaccuracies. There are evidently a fair number of them. But that doesn't bother me. What bothered me was that Scott and his crew never made this story come alive. Why spend all that money and all those resources on something that just is not interesting?

This movie has a fine cast - Gene Raymond, who had been in the hit *Flying Down to Rio* a few years before; Ann Southern, who would play second lead to some of Hollywood's biggest names, and had already been in a few good musicals; the character actors Eric Blore, Helen Crawford, and Erik Rhodes - and an occasional clever line, but it doesn't seem to go anywhere, and is sometimes rather choppy.

It was obviously released as a B movie - the opening credits are cheaply done, and it's only 58 minutes long - but my guess is that something happened along the way, and that it was meant to be at least a little longer than what we have. Even B movies were usually around 75 minutes. Scenes or parts of scenes seem to be missing. Perhaps more musical numbers? The poster presents Southern as a sultry vamp, and that's not at all her character in the movie. There also isn't anything in the movie to suggest that she's particularly smart. Raymond's character does all the plotting. Something went wrong along the way to completion here.

If you're an Ann Southern fan - I can't imagine that there are any Gene Raymond fans left - you won't have to suffer to get through this. But don't expect to remember any of it 24 hours later.

This movie has several huge dance numbers - not just big, but huge. Huge, elaborate sets, with dozens and dozens of people in beautiful costumes.

But the numbers are uninspired. Eleanor Powell's famous Rosalie number, where she dances on drums and then through hoops of what looks like plastic, must have taken endless rehearsals and astounding energy. But it just isn't interesting.

And neither are the Cole Porter songs. The title song is ok. In the Still of the NIght starts off great but loses steam after the first line. The rest of the numbers are totally forgettable.

And the script is strictly from hunger. Some very fine actors wasted on lines and situations that go nowhere. Frank Morgan, a great actor, looks downright embarrassed when he has to appear with that ugly dummy.

I cannot understand why MGM poured so much money into what was so clearly a dud.

In all fairness, however, it was one of the top box office hits of 1937, far outearning pictures that we today regard as classics. How it did that I can't say.

Watch it at your own risk.

Maybe I was just in a bad mood. I sat through it because I had just had my eyes dilated and couldn't do anything much except watch tv. Maybe there was some other reason. I don't pretend to be an avid fan of political correctness.

But the countless scenes of Willie Best literally shaking in his shoes when no one else was afraid of the so-called ghost really got to me for their blatant racism.

If there had been other Black characters in the movie, it would have been different. Best would just have been a cowardly individual. And those certainly come in all colors.

But because he was the only Black in the movie, and because we had to sit through him quaking over and over again, it really got to me.