Reviews

Except for the amusing banter between Fred Gwynne and Bob Hoskins, the Caucasian characters in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club" just get in the way. The will-they-won't-they romance between Richard Gere and Diane Lane doesn't mean a thing to us; we don't care if they end up with each other or not.

The scenes inside the club are really exciting, though. You never want to leave. Gregory Hines' dancing is the kind you could watch for hours. But the best scene in "Cotton Club" is when the gorgeous Lonette McKee takes the stage to sing a stunning version of "Ill Wind." She is as beautiful as young Lena Horne, a feast for the eyes and ears. The director was wise not to place this number too early in the film because the movie never recovers afterward. Not that there was a lot to recover.

Nick Cage is in there somewhere, so is Laurence Fishburne. Joe Dallisandro makes a cameo at the end as a gangster. All he does is sit there, but he was still handsome then and eye-candy was just about all the white leads offer in "Cotton Club."

One of these days a director is going to make a movie about the New York City of the twenties or early thirties that will have vitality and wit, peopled with the legendary theatrical characters of that era (Tallulah, Robert Benchley, the Barrymores for example). Not like the one from Alan Rudolph about Dorothy Parker; Jennifer Jason Leigh and Campbell Scott tried hard to save that one but the director was all over the place as usual doing his poor Robert Altman impression.

Up until around 1970 Lucille Ball was one great comedienne. She was such a perfect clown I only wish more people could have seen her with Bob Hope in "The Facts of Life" because she could do dry deadpan, too. as well as slapstick.

Yep, Lucille Ball was wonderful . . . until "Mame."

Trying to see Lucille Ball in "Mame" is physically impossible because there is so much Vaseline and filters on the camera lenses that you'd need Windex to see her face in some scenes. So even if you see Lucille Ball in "Mame," you can't really see Lucille Ball in "Mame". Which is a blessing.

That's about the nicest thing I can say about "Mame," the movie of the Broadway musical of the movie version of the play (this could go on, but it started with a perfectly funny book called "Auntie Mame"). Giving this a bad rap is like beating a sponge. So it does not matter that the music is croaked rather than sung. Most of the songs weren't much, anyway. There isn't any difference in the first three. "It's Today," "Open a New Window," and "We Need a Little Christmas" are all the same song. (Celene Dion should do an album with them, they're so big and dull. ) The killer ballad "If He Walked Into My Life Today" needs a confident voice (Edyie Gorme won a Grammy for doing it in 1967) that poor Lucille Ball did not possess when she made this movie. (True, Elaine Stritch can't carry a tune in a bucket, either, but at least Stritch can put over a song.)

If you still feel your life is not going to be complete unless you see Lucy in "Mame," notice how there IS dancing in it, but whenever Lucy/Mame starts to do anything beyond a palsied shuffle the camera cuts away, then returns right when the number is over and the star poses with the dancers. Again, it's just as well. Jane Connell got to reprise the role of pathetic Agnes Gooch after Lucille Ball had Madeline Kahn fired to ensure no comic originality would upstage the star. Connell is a stage performer who, like Carol Channing and Ethyl Merman, can't scale down her performances for films, so she joins Lucille Ball in being embarrassing, though for different reasons.

The lavish gowns are by Theadora Van Runkle (Van Wrinkle?) and they provide the color missing in all but one of the cast.

Bea Arthur as the actress Vera Charles, Mame's best friend, ignores everyone and does her own fun thing. If only she was in more scenes. She's too old for her role, too, but at least she didn't maim it.

Whether or not George Cukor would have made a good, sexy comedy from "Something's Gotta Give" is a moot point. We'll never know if it would have been compared favorably to its source, the very funny Cary Grant/Irene Dunn movie "My Favorite Wife." It would have to have been better than "Move Over, Darling," the mess it turned into after Marilyn Monroe died.

We don't know what sort of screen chemistry would have been generated by Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin (though if an actor ever came off bad with Martin, it wasn't Martin's fault). We don't know if the public would have accepted Monroe as a performer of significance for the emerging nineteen-sixties; each new decade necessitates weeding out what or whom isn't going to work from the previous one. We don't even know if this movie would have been entertaining or embarrassing, or both like "Some Like It Hot."

But thanks to the 37 minutes of footage that someone managed to find, process, and splice together, we do know a couple of things:

1. Though a little underweight, Marilyn Monroe still looked like she would glow in the dark; sexy, funny, tremendously likable to men and to women, and unlike any of her imitators. She drops a lot of the breathless affectations she picked up around "How to Marry a Millionaire," using mostly the sweet voice we hear in her TV interviews.

2. She missed lines here and there but Marilyn was touching and convincing as a mother of two kids (!) as well as a sexy wife. Nobody seems to be enjoying the famous nude swim scene more than she.

It's common knowledge that a few weeks into shooting "Something's Gotta Give" Marilyn was fired by 20th Century Fox. What too few people know is that shortly thereafter the studio and her agents were already negotiating a new contract for Marilyn, one that would guarantee her better material, choices of directors, and a substantially higher salary. A few upcoming projects that were being considered for her were "Period of Adjustment," "Irma La Douce," "Two for the Seesaw," and "What a Way to Go."

If you have a chance to see this 37-minute curiosity, do so by all means. It isn't much, but it's like Marilyn popping out of the sky, laughing and giving us one last wink.

Went to see the movie "Troy" this afternoon. Here's what I learned:

Contrary to popular opinion and history in general, Greek men were not gay. EVER. This was clearly established immediately at the start of the film and reinforced every five minutes or so thereafter. So it is safe for American dudes to see this movie.

Helen of Troy always had impeccable hair and makeup. She looked gorgeous in all of her brief cameo scenes which, though numerous, were probably all filmed on the same day, one after the other, with the director saying, "Alright, now look beautiful . . . good ... OK, now look frightened ... good... now look depressed ... good ... now look interested . . . good ... now look beautiful again ... good..."

Most Greek and Trojan men had British accents. Those with American accents couldn't act.

Trojans looked just like Greeks, but they tended to stay on the right side of the screen.

Brad Pitt does not blink on camera.

Helen of Troy's biggest line was, "They're coming for me."

Trojan music sounded remarkably like modern Bulgarian music.

Brad Pitt's thighs go all the way up.

Achilles had a young male friend with whom he was very close, but it's OK. They were cousins. Never mind what history says.

Peter O'Toole can tell an entire story with just an expression.

Trojan gods apparently all had Greek names, but their statues either looked Egyptian or like Peter O'Toole in drag.

Greek men never touched each other unless they were fighting, much like American men.

All of the thousands of extras in the movie had exactly the same skin color... Light Egyptian, by Max Factor.

Troy had only three women.

There were lots of blond Greeks, which is good news for Brad Pitt, who would otherwise have really stuck out.

Despite their coastal desert locale, Greeks had the uncanny ability to find unlimited amounts of timber to build fires, funeral pyres, Trojan horses and the like.

British actors look silly with Greek hairdos.

Brad Pitt changes expression only when the sun is shining directly in his eyes.

Greek soldiers fought constantly, but their outfits always looked impeccable.

Greek soldiers wore underwear under their skirts.

Apparently Greek temples were always in ruins, even back when they were all new.

Once upon a time I worshiped Barbra Streisand. There, I said it. That's over. For that matter, so is my love affair with Streisand. What happened to the heat and abandon she had in her first few albums, the ones with the fantastic versions of Harold Arlen ballads? Listening to her on the Broadway cast album of "Funny Girl" only makes us painfully aware of how much we lost when she decided to "act" the songs for us in the movie.

The night it opened in Cincinnati I sat with my best buddy vibrating with excitement (I can even tell you the color of the curtain that hung over the screen). By the end of the night I was actually depressed. Where were my favorite songs from the show? I was really looking forward to seeing her sing"Cornet Man" and it made me sick to see they replaced that great tune with something lame called "The Roller Skate Rag" that went "Thud!" (You're supposed to find it hysterically funny that Fanny messed up a line of third-rate singers and dancers by falling all over them because she couldn't skate.)

Because the star, herself, and the producers were sure no one wanted to see anyone but Barbra Streisand (and they had a point . . . sort of), they cut everyone else's numbers until the movie of "Funny Girl" was pretty much another Streisand TV special. After I saw the movie I wanted to do some cutting of my own, especially on the embarrassing "Swan Lake" number that replaced the satirical "Private Schwartz from Rockaway." I also wanted to cut everything but about 15 minutes of the second half of the film.

The Ziegfeld Follies numbers look like bad 1960's television, there is no chemistry in the love scenes between the wooden Omar Sharif and Streisand, Kay Medford is wasted, and whatever kept Fanny Brice growing as a legendary comedienne is dropped after the pleasantly silly "His Love Makes Me Beautiful." We get a quick flash of her in Baby Snooks drag when she takes on the reporters but that's all. (And, anyway, Fanny Brice didn't take up the Baby Snooks routine until years later.)

Instead of the rueful tune "Who Are You Now?" we got another mediocre replacement song, the "title" song "Funny Girl," which takes the focus of Fanny's heartbreak away from what she might be doing to her husband (out of love, albeit) and puts it on what all the suffering is doing to her. I suppose this should have told us in what direction Barbara Streisand was going like a runaway train.

Oh, there's no denying there are parts of the movie that show her off at her best, and that best can be very fine. Over forty years have gone by and she never again touched the bravado and power of her final number "My Man," even if that business about it being done in one take with her singing perfectly while crying is pure bull. For one thing, it is physiologically impossible. They took her vocal of "My Man" from off the "My Name is Barbra" album and dubbed it in with a new orchestral arrangement. The effect is great so it doesn't really matter except for the Star's dishonesty in perpetuating that story.

And when Streisand stops jumping all over the place and stands still to sing the last stanza of "I'm the Greatest Star" she's amazing, even if the post dubbing is terribly obvious.

I'm a sport, though. When "Funny Girl" was restored ten years ago I let a couple of friends talk me into seeing it again. I forgot it would mean nearly three hours of my life, but, as I said, I'm a sport. But, thirty-six years later, "Funny Girl" redux only made me painfully aware that I was right the first time.

This movie is so funny, I don't know where to begin. Cecil B. even got the testaments mixed up. Early in "The Ten Commandments," the Egyptian big shots declare that they must find the infant Moses and that "a star proclaimed his birth." Wrong Jew, idiots! That star didn't happen for, oh, just years and years yet. But wait, in the words of Margo Channing, "It gets better!"

The whole movie is one delicious,vulgar hoot after another. When it first was released in 1956, "Time" magazine, in a rare burst of wit, titled their review "Sexodus." I mean, there are Jethro's horny, whorey daughters out in the desert dancing like fools for the visitor Moses; then at the end of one scene Yvonne deCarlo looks directly into the camera for no particular reason as if to say "So, do I move here or what?" You'll love hot Yul Bryner with his braided pony tail coming out the side of his head (looking about as Egyptian as Omar Shariff looked Russian in "Zhivago"); the flirtatious Ethiopian princess, just drooling all over Moses (contrary to the plot of "Aida," and History in general, her country is only too happy to have been invaded and conquered by Egypt); and that blind man's line at the parting of the Red Sea about how God separated the waters with a blast of his nostrils is such a reverent moment in cinema.

The plagues are embarrassing; no wonder the pharaoh didn't give in, and that Hallmark card "burning bush" was anything but on fire. Even as a child, I thought "Aww, hell, they could have done that one better." The Death Angel is only a trail of creeping green fog! Get out! Why didn't the Jews just use their fans to blow it the other way? God's voice is full of testosterone, as usual, but He sounds bored for most of the movie.

And there are strange unexplained items such as how come the Golden Calf was sitting down? It only looks like a half-calf. What is Vincent Price doing in here? How many times did Martha Scott play Charlton Heston's mother? Where are the rest of the plagues? Where's the manna? Why is Miriam always in a bad mood?

Lovely Debra Padget deserved a better musical number than "Death Commith To Me." I'd have chosen a ballad, myself, something like "Prisoner of Love" or maybe "Suppertime," because it was, after all, the first Passover. John Derick flashes some decent thigh.

But, except for the bodies of Charlton Heston and Yul Bryner, Anne Baxter takes the plaid rabbit. She's the only one (except for maybe Edward G. Robinson) who seems to be in on the joke. She vamps and camps, seems to be having a great time. "Your tongue will dig your grave, Mamnet," she says before sending Judith Anderson off to her big dirt nap. "Do you hear laughter, Ramses?" she taunts. I wanted her to say "Not the laughter of Kings or Jews, but the audience! We're a hit, Baby! We can work this from here to Hackensack! We're killin' 'em!"