Reviews

I selected this film on TV completely blind. I had never heard of it, and was aware of none of the actors. Once the movie started, I was instantly aware that we weren't in the USA any more. The mountains didn't look right, and neither did the train. My first guess was Spain, except that the train wasn't right for that either. I finally gave in and looked up the film and learned that it was made in New Zealand. I realized then that it was made as homage to real Westerns, and the writers didn't have a clue. The film is a Slice Of Life story that attempts to follow the Hitchcock dictum of having the pictures tell the story, but leaves the audience without a clue as to where the storyline is taking them. What is worse is the fact that the writer tried to portray the culture of the 19th Century west as one stereotype after another, the action is never explained at all, and the audience must infer what the writer had in mind when he put pen to paper. If you like treating Slice Of Life movies as Jigsaw Puzzles, this film is for you. If Slice Of Life isn't your bag, don't waste your time.

"The Mortal Storm" got good reviews in 1940, although the Box Office results for this film were not generally good. It suffered from the fact that reality quickly caught up with official Neutrality. Following the war, "The Mortal Storm" became one of the "Hollywood Ten" Films during the McCarthy era. This was because of the fact that it was considered vaguely "Pro-Communist" prior to Pearl Harbor, and that judgment came back to haunt the film and all concerned with it following the war. It was one of the films investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950, and – as a result – the Director, Frank Borzage, was Blacklisted until his death in 1962. As a Director, he did not work again until 1955, and he only appeared once as an Actor in 1957. He remained uncredited.

The 1974 version of "The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 was much more realistic than this version because the person the NYCTA assigned with decision authority to guide the project was listened to.

In the original version, they used a real train for the portions of the movie that required location work, while in this version they used a real train as little as possible. In no case did they show actual Train Operator and Conductor Cabs. When they had the scenes in the Train Operator's Cab, the layout was flipped, with the Train Operator on the left side instead of the right, and lots of phony flashing lights on the back wall.

In the original version, they kept the train on the line that a #6 train would actually use, while in this version they were all over the system, ending up in Coney Island, a location the #6 Train could never approach much less reach.

The chase scene down what was supposed to be the Lexington Avenue Line was actually a montage of clips strung end to end which showed several other lines mixed in with Lexington Avenue clips.

Most of the location work was done at Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station (Where Michael Jackson did his "Beat It" Video) and on Track Two between Hoyt Schermerhorn and the Court Street Transit Museum, with establishing shots made at Grand Central and 14th Street-Union Square.

In the original, all location work was done on the Lexington Avenue Line between 51st Street and Brooklyn Bridge, with the final scene taking place on the City Hall Loop.

The 1974scenes that showed a single car uncoupled from the rest of the train was plausible because the cars used in that version could be uncoupled and operated as single cars. The R-142 Cars in this version are coupled together as permanent five-car sets (two per train), and cannot be uncoupled as shown in service.

The street work, which obviously was set to show how hard it would be to drive through Manhattan in Mid-day, pushed that plausible scenario over the top. Furthermore, the NY Federal Reserve shown in this version was actually the Post Office down the street from the former World Trade Center in Manhattan, NOT the Federal Reserve Bank which is down near Wall Street. Observant viewers will recall that the real Fed stood in for itself in the third "Die Hard" movie.

I was prepared to suspend disbelief for this movie, given its complex nature and highly technical subject, but I could stick my tongue only so far into my cheek before I started to gag. For someone not familiar with either the New York Subway or the geography of New York City, the movie can be a lot of fun. John Travolta, Denzel Washington and John Turtorro fans will like seeing their stars at work, and James Gondolfini does a reasonable turn as a supporting cast member playing the NYC Mayor. This film is very much superior to the TV version of the 1990s, but is very weak when compared to the original 1974 version.

This version of the Cinderella story does much to include the contemporary events of the time of the fairytale, but it also does much to include the "Political Correctness" that infects the world today.

The Cinderella story is based on "The Cinder Maid" by Joseph Jacobs, which can be found at the following link: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510a.html

If the Cinderella of the movie existed, and behaved as Drew Barrymore portrayed her, she would have been executed for impertinence many times over. Women of the time in the story were nothing like she was portrayed.