It's hardly daring _ even compared to what D.W. Griffith was doing at the same time in America _ and it's hardly Oscar Wilde. The play's verbal wit, of course, is a casualty _ there's no room for it in the subtitles. Not only has the plot been changed to shoehorn it into 64 minutes of pantomime, but the movie skews the material toward the lachrymose by telling us immediately that Mrs. Erlynne is the title character's mother (and casting such a matronly actress that the idea of Lady Windermere seeing her as a sexual threat is, to put it mildly, far-fetched). And the director usually keeps the camera as solidly planted in one place as a potted palm, and avoids close-ups unless he wants us to read a letter or see a photograph. For all that, it's fast-moving, easy to follow, and not at all embarrassing. It actually does capture some of Oscar Wilde's atmosphere. The actors (one gathers they were West End performers doing a little extra day work) aren't bad _ they are much less hammy than Griffith's stock company. But the liveliest scene, oddly, has nothing to do with the plot. It's a visit to a dog show, possibly done on location, with advertisements for Spratt's Dog Food plastered in every vacant spot. (Product placement in 1916?) I think the director liked the dogs more than he liked the play.
Reviews
5 Reviews
The Lost Boys go West
5 February 2001
Warning: Spoilers
Seeing this film again on DVD -- more than 30 years after the first time I saw it -- I'm struck by two things. First, it holds up well for a movie so redolent of a particular time (the 1960s, of course, not the 1890s). Second, whether the filmmakers fully intended it this way or not, it's really a very good film about a topic Westerns don't tackle often: arrested adolescence.
Most great Westerns -- ``My Darling Clementine,'' ``Rio Bravo,'' ``The Wild Bunch,'' ``Unforgiven'' -- are about adults. ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' is about two guys who, physically, are pushing 40, but whose mental age is stuck somewhere around 16. They may be charming, but their whole lives revolve around their narcissistic pal-ship. For them, being outlaws doesn't seem to be about expressing anti-social impulses or even getting money they haven't earned, but merely about hanging out with each other. Their talk with each other is mainly brittle ritualized patter and stock jokes, mixed with Butch's pipe dreams. They can't talk about anything serious even at the end, when they must realize -- at some level -- that they're about to die. Screenwriter William Goldman emphasizes the oddly callow, adolescent tone of their relationship by repeatedly having them express surprise when they stumble over some bit of biography -- their real names, or the fact that Sundance is from New Jersey -- that you'd think real friends would have known about decades ago.
The movie's whole point is that Butch and Sundance can't develop any type of dramatic arc. Harshly changing times demand they change with the times or die -- and they can't change and ultimately choose, by default, to die. They do get a huge lucky break when they get away from the Superposse _ but all they can think to do with it is change not what they're doing, but merely where they're doing it. They can't even change enough to keep Etta Place with them, even though both Butch and Sundance really do love her, in their way. (Etta, in contrast to Butch and Sundance, is harshly realistic about her life and her limits -- she knows she isn't strong enough to die with them or to see them die.) Butch and Sundance, as far as we can see, don't care about much outside themselves and Etta.
This is why the movie's ending -- that famous freeze frame -- is so perfect. Butch and Sundance are secure, together, in their niche in history. They don't have to worry about changing times or the baffling world outside themselves any longer. They've won out over time and change -- the only way anybody ever can.
Most great Westerns -- ``My Darling Clementine,'' ``Rio Bravo,'' ``The Wild Bunch,'' ``Unforgiven'' -- are about adults. ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' is about two guys who, physically, are pushing 40, but whose mental age is stuck somewhere around 16. They may be charming, but their whole lives revolve around their narcissistic pal-ship. For them, being outlaws doesn't seem to be about expressing anti-social impulses or even getting money they haven't earned, but merely about hanging out with each other. Their talk with each other is mainly brittle ritualized patter and stock jokes, mixed with Butch's pipe dreams. They can't talk about anything serious even at the end, when they must realize -- at some level -- that they're about to die. Screenwriter William Goldman emphasizes the oddly callow, adolescent tone of their relationship by repeatedly having them express surprise when they stumble over some bit of biography -- their real names, or the fact that Sundance is from New Jersey -- that you'd think real friends would have known about decades ago.
The movie's whole point is that Butch and Sundance can't develop any type of dramatic arc. Harshly changing times demand they change with the times or die -- and they can't change and ultimately choose, by default, to die. They do get a huge lucky break when they get away from the Superposse _ but all they can think to do with it is change not what they're doing, but merely where they're doing it. They can't even change enough to keep Etta Place with them, even though both Butch and Sundance really do love her, in their way. (Etta, in contrast to Butch and Sundance, is harshly realistic about her life and her limits -- she knows she isn't strong enough to die with them or to see them die.) Butch and Sundance, as far as we can see, don't care about much outside themselves and Etta.
This is why the movie's ending -- that famous freeze frame -- is so perfect. Butch and Sundance are secure, together, in their niche in history. They don't have to worry about changing times or the baffling world outside themselves any longer. They've won out over time and change -- the only way anybody ever can.
Jumanji
(1995)
Fine special effects, fizzled screenplay
26 December 2000
This is another of those films where a 30-minute documentary on how they did the special effects would be a lot more interesting (not to mention a lot shorter) than the movie itself. The digital effects and animatronics are great; the screenplay doesn't work. A complicated narrative set-up (which keeps the star, Robin Williams, off screen for the first half-hour) is followed by an hour of screaming and running around which doesn't develop much of anything. The big problem isn't hard to pinpoint: The movie has no real antagonist _ no villain. The supernatural board game of the title not only doesn't have a personality (it is, after all, only a board game), it doesn't have an intelligible plan. We find out nothing about how or why it exists. It's just a sort of random hazard generator. The four main characters survive the hazards just long enough, the game ends _ end of movie. The pasted-on homilies the screenplay comes up with _ the need for courage, commitment, real parent-child communication _ are drowned out in the hubbub, and a good cast (not to mention a big budget) is wasted. And they're planning a sequel to THIS? Have they run out of good (or even mediocre) films to do sequels to?
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1968)
A Hard Day's Midsummer Night's Dream
24 January 2000
The Bard and the Royal Shakespeare Company fight the Swinging '60s to a respectable draw in this production, which does feature nearly all of the text of the play, splendidly _ if often frenetically _ delivered. Director Peter Hall couldn't quite come up with a film equivalent of his famous stage production, which featured modern dress, a stark white set, and imaginative use of trapezes. Instead he picked an approach heavily influenced by the French New Wave and its English imitators, notably Richard Lester. There's lots of jangly, abrupt editing _ which sometimes, as intended, captures the supernatural flitting of the fairies, and sometimes is just annoying. There's lots of talking to the camera, and a certain catch-as-catch-can attitude: shots don't match up, and, although the main action is supposed to take place at night, there's sometimes no effort to disguise the sunlight streaming through the trees. (Of course, perhaps some of this was the result not of artistic decisions, but merely of haste and a tiny budget.) It's somehow a very '60s Athens _ Hermia and Helena wear cute miniskirts, the four lovers get so twig-torn and mud-spattered that they look like refugees from Woodstock, and the fairies look like green-skinned members of a back-to-nature commune. For all the eccentricities, this festive but haunting play is done straight and done well, and the cast ranges from solid to splendid. The two standouts are Diana Rigg (Helena) and Judi Dench (Titania) _ and this is your one and only chance to see the former sucking her thumb and the latter wearing an outfit (consisting mainly of body paint and flecks of vegetation) that Blaze Starr might have found drafty.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1935)
Trying at times, but worth seeing
11 January 2000
By lunging for some quick prestige, Warner Brothers recorded the approach to the play taken by the esteemed emigre stage director Max Reinhardt in his famous production at the Hollywood Bowl a year earlier. The Reinhardt style was considered striking stuff in the mid-'30s -- today it comes across as a thoroughly traditional approach, with poetically blurred cinematography, twinkling stars, misty woods, fairies that flutter, trill and prance, Mendelssohn music, and heavy cutting of the text to allow time for musical interludes and assorted prancing through the greensward. It's respectful, entertaining and has some striking moments _ although it's not the classic the studio was obviously hoping for. Since Warners' contract roster wasn't exactly the Old Vic, the casting is hit and miss. The hits include James Cagney playing Bottom as an energetic, amiably clueless hambone; the beguiling and spirited Olivia de Havilland as Hermia (her film debut); Anita Louise as an angelically beautiful and graceful Titania; and Victor Jory's authoritative, rather sinister Oberon. As for the misses: Dick Powell and Ross Alexander's twerpy Lysander and Demetrius, and, Lord help us, Mickey Rooney as Puck _ after about five minutes of his braying, chortling and mugging, you start hoping W.C. Fields will show up.
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