Thursday, July 24, 2014

WITH ITS NON-EXISTENT BOX OFFICE, 'CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC' MIGHT HAVE BEEN MORE APTLY TITLED "CAN'T STAND THE MUSIC"




How bad is this infamous 1980 musical mega-dud? CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC is so bad that it stars not, one, not two, but three people who can't sing, dance or act.

Steve Guttenberg is the composer who, if he can't make it in showbiz, is going "back to dental school" (which is where co-producer/co-writer Allan Carr found him); Valerie Perrine is the very chunky "Garbo of models"; and Olympic champ, Reality show celebrity and current plastic surgery experiment-in-progress Bruce Jenner is around just so he can be stripped down to his boxer shorts, with both Perrine and Guttenberg on their knees in front of him (don't ask).

Guttenberg's good pal Perrine, having offered to round up male singers who can do justice to his "great" songs, starts her search by "going for a Baskin-Robbins rush" — thus suggesting that sugar is to blame for her selection of the Village People as this movie's stars of tomorrow. (The "gimmick" of this late-'70s disco group of chorus boy types was their homoerotic "macho" regalia – one was a cop, another a cowboy, plus a construction worker, a GI, a leather-clad bad boy and, yes, an Indian.) Modeling magnate Tammy Grimes puts it succinctly: "There's really no accounting for taste."

This movie was the last word in the chichi "bisexuality" (read: gay) trend so flaunted in the late seventies – everyone in it behaves like a just-out-of-the-closet case. With a basso profundo that makes her sound like a drag queen, Grimes actually acts like one when she lays eyes on Jenner: "Fruit of the Loom is doing a big ad campaign. Something tells me you could really fit into a pair of jockey shorts."

This film's relentless obsession with how lads look in and out of their underwear makes it doubly surprising that the director was a woman, the late Bounty paper towel shill Nancy Walker. The recurring skivies motif reaches epic proportions during the infamous "Y.M.C.A." number: As the Village People prance around a health club singing, "You can get yourself clean/You can get a good meal/You can do whatever you feel," male wrestlers pin each other to the mat in geometric patterns (like chorines in a Busby Berkeley musical), Speedo-clad boy bathing beauties dive into a pool (like chorines in an Esther Williams musical), and naked men lather each other up in the shower (like nothing you've ever seen before). For a big finish, these guys line up to form a giant human "Y," and we can only wonder, "Y indeed?"

Answering the question "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Gypsy Rose Lee's kid sis June Havoc turns up to exclaim that the Village People seem "just like Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall" (actually, they seem just like Garland's audience), and then tells her son, Guttenberg, "It's your music that's bringing all these talented boys together – they ought to get down on their knees!" Such single entendres run in the family, for Guttenberg assures Perrine, "Anybody who could swallow two Sno Balls and a Ding-Dong shouldn't have any trouble with pride!"

But it’s Perrine who gets the most telling line of all: "This is the '80s, darling! You're going to see a lot of things you've never seen before." Well, yes, but little did she realize that she, Jenner, the Village People and Allan Carr musicals weren’t going to be among them.



DELICIOUSLY BAD, 1980's 'XANADU' WAS INDEED "A PLACE WHERE NOBODY DARED TO GO."

The musical that would have reunited the stars of Grease if Olivia Newton-John had had her way (but John Travolta, apparently holding out for an even worse script, waited for the 1983 Two of a Kind), XANADU broke new Bad Movie ground by grafting '40s whimsy together with late '70s muzak to pioneer discokitsch. From the opening scene --- when a wall mural of nine babes comes alive so that chorus girls dressed in Bobbi Mannix's peasant-chic garb can run, hop, and rollerskate --- it's clear that this is the inevitable companion to Can't Stop the Music. Delightfully dreadful on their own, viewed together back-to-back they are unassailable as the worst movie musicals ever.

Acting exactly as if she were still a painting on a wall, Newton-John has come to earth to "inspire" down-on-his luck artist Michael Beck, hoping this movie will do fo her what Down to Earth did for Rita Hayworth and One Touch of Venus did for Ava Gardner. "Inspire" him to do what, you ask? Why, to open a roller-disco nightclub, natch, with the backing of rich, lonely Gene Kelly. (Some favor she's doing them, for such skating palaces faded faster than Pet Rocks.)

After giving Beck only her first name, Newton-John aptly sums up her cinematic appeal when she says, "Listen. you know enough about me already --- any more, and you're going to get a headache." Meanwhile, Kelly looks in a mirror and says exactly what we're thinking: "You're getting old." Indeed, his presence effectively makes Newton-John look, well, youngish.

The movie's tacky highlight occurs when Beck and Kelly literally conjure up their visions of their club-to-be, combining the worst of faux '40s musicals with shallow '70s rock, and the two clash together on screen in an electric-orange-jumpsuit-meets-striped-zoot-suits production number that punishes both the eye and the ear --- while tickling the funny bone, "I love it," enthuses Kelly, "I may be crazy." (May be?)

The madness escalates when Beck and Newton-John take Kelly shopping at Fiorucci --- the Eurotrash emporium of the day --- which they correctly call "a franchise glitz dealer." Kelly's musical fashion show is one for the ages --- he must've been desperate for a comeback to agree to dance as a giant pinball across a pinball game set (because the only other explanation is senility). "We've been painted by Michelangelo, Shakespeare's written sonnets for us, Beethoven's played music for us," Newton-John muses to Beck (never mentioning that now Electric Light Orchestra has wailed for them). "Let's skate!" cries Kelly on the club's opening night, so jugglers, mimes, waiters, and what appear to be Tomorrowland employees all skate in circles, holloring "Ho!" (Someone should have guessed that audiences would be pealing, "Ho-ho-ho!")

On a personal note, your hostess managed to catch Xanadu on the big screen three times in one week before Universal ripped it out of cinemas due to general lack of interest. (Very oddly, the soundtrack album saw sales that went right through the roof!)

With animation (don't ask) by Don Bluth and later turned into a hit 2007 Broadway musical (Who knew!), Xanadu is an absolute must-see for discriminating collectors of the sublimely bad in musical cinema.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Delicious remembers talented actor and enduring Hollywood leading man James Garner (1928 - 2014)


James Garner, Witty, Handsome Leading Man, Dies at 86
By Bruce Weber, NY Times, July 20, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/movies/james-garner-actor-dies-at-86.html?_r=0#

James Garner, the wry and handsome leading man who slid seamlessly between television and the movies but was best known as the amiable gambler Bret Maverick in the 1950s western “Maverick” and the cranky sleuth Jim Rockford in the 1970s series “The Rockford Files,” was found dead in his California home on Saturday night, the Los Angeles Police said. He was 86.

Mr. Garner came to acting late, and by accident. On his own after the age of 14 and a bit of a drifter, he had been working an endless series of jobs: telephone installer, oilfield roughneck, chauffeur, dishwasher, janitor, lifeguard, grocery clerk, salesman and, fatefully, gas station attendant. While pumping gas in Los Angeles, he met a young man named Paul Gregory, who was working nearby as a soda jerk but wanted to be an agent.
 
Years later,  he was working as a carpet layer in Los Angeles for a business run by his father. One afternoon he was driving on La Cienega Boulevard and saw a sign: Paul Gregory & Associates. Just then a car pulled out of a space in front of the building, and Mr. Garner, on a whim, pulled in. He was 25.

Mr. Gregory, by then an agent and a theatrical producer, hired him for a nonspeaking part in his production of Herman Wouk’s “Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” which starred Henry Fonda, John Hodiak and Lloyd Nolan. It opened in Santa Barbara and toured the country before going to Broadway, where it opened in January 1954 and ran for 415 performances. Mr. Garner said he learned to act from running lines with the stars and watching them perform, especially Mr. Fonda, another good-looking actor with a sly streak.
 
He found steady work in movies, however. In “The Children’s Hour” (1961), an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play, he played a doctor engaged to a schoolteacher (Audrey Hepburn) accused of being a lesbian. He appeared uncomfortable in that earnest role, but he was winning and warm in “The Great Escape” (1963), the World War II adventure about captured Allied flyers plotting to break out of a German prison camp, as Bob Hendley, the resourceful prisoner known as the Scrounger.

In 1964 he starred with Julie Andrews in “The Americanization of Emily,” which he called his favorite of all his films. He played the personal attendant of a Navy admiral, a fish out of water and the voice of the movie’s pacifist point of view.
 
He also appeared in romantic comedies, including three in 1963: “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling,” both with Doris Day, and “The Wheeler Dealers,” opposite Lee Remick. There was also a comic western, “Support Your Local Sheriff” (1969), and a follow-up, “Support Your Local Gunfighter” (1971). Other notable films included “Victor/Victoria” (1982), in which he was reunited with Ms. Andrews, playing a man in love with a woman pretending to be a man. 
 
Garner appeared in the television films “My Name is Bill W” (1989), starring James Woods as the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and “Barbarians at the Gate” (1993), based on the best-selling book about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco; in “My Fellow Americans” (1996), a comic adventure in which he and Jack Lemmon played feuding former presidents who find themselves framed by the sitting president and end up together on the lam; and in the romantic film “The Notebook” (2004).
 
He reprised his Rockford character in several television movies and appeared in the movie version of “Maverick” (1994) as Marshal Zane Cooper, a foil to the title character, played by Mel Gibson.
 
Later, there were recurring roles on a number of shows, including “Chicago Hope,” “First Monday” and “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter”; in the short-lived animated series “God, the Devil and Bob,” he was the voice of God.
 
Mr. Garner, a lifelong Democrat who was active in behalf of civil rights and environmental causes, always said he met his wife, the former Lois Clarke, in 1956 at a presidential campaign rally for Adlai Stevenson, though in “The Garner Files” Mrs. Garner said they had actually met at a party earlier. She survives him, as do their daughter, Greta, known as Gigi; and Mrs. Garner’s daughter from a previous marriage, Kimberly.
 
Persuasively ambivalent as a hero of westerns, war movies and detective stories, Mr. Garner’s performances may have reflected his feelings about his profession.
 
“I was never enamored of the business, never even wanted to be an actor, really,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It’s always been a means to an end, which is to make a living.”
 
 
 

Thursday, July 17, 2014

DELICIOUS REMEMBERS: A sad farewell to one of the great dames of the American Theatre; Broadway's beloved "Stritchie."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/theater/elaine-stritch-tart-tongued-broadway-actress-and-singer-is-dead-at-89.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1

Elaine Stritch, Tart-Tongued Broadway Actress and Singer, Is Dead at 89
By Bruce Weber and Robert Berkvist, July 17, 2014


Elaine Stritch, the brassy, tart-tongued Broadway actress and singer who became a living emblem of show business durability and perhaps the leading interpreter of Stephen Sondheim’s wryly acrid musings on aging, died on Thursday at her home in Birmingham, Mich. She was 89.
 
Her death was confirmed by a friend, Julie Keyes. Before Ms. Stritch moved to Birmingham last year, she lived, famously, for many years at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan.

Ms. Stritch’s career began in the 1940s and included her fair share of appearances in movies, including Woody Allen’s “September” (1987) and “Small Time Crooks” (2000), and on television; well into her 80s, she played a recurring role on the NBC comedy “30 Rock” as the domineering mother of the television executive played by Alec Baldwin. But the stage was her true professional home, where, whether in musicals, nonmusical dramas or solo cabaret shows, she drew audiences to her with her whiskey voice, her seen-it-all manner and the blunt charisma of a star.

Plainspoken, egalitarian, impatient with fools and foolishness, and admittedly fond of cigarettes, alcohol and late nights — she finally gave up smoking and drinking in her 60s — though she took it up again — Ms. Stritch might be the only actor to work as a bartender after starring on Broadway, and she was completely unabashed about her good-time-girl attitude.
 
“I’m not a bit opposed to your mentioning in this article that Frieda Fun here has had a reputation in the theater, for the past five or six years, for drinking,” she said to a reporter for The New York Times in 1968. “I drink and I love to drink, and it’s part of my life.”

Most of the time she was equally unabashed onstage, rarely if ever leaving the sensually astringent elements of her personality behind when she performed. A highlight of her early stage career was the 1952 revival of “Pal Joey,” the Rodgers and Hart/John O’Hara musical, in which she played a shrewd, ambitious reporter recalling, in song, an interview with Gypsy Rose Lee; she drew bravas for her rendition of the striptease parody “Zip.”
 
In a nonsinging role in William Inge’s 1955 drama, “Bus Stop,” she received a Tony nomination as the lonely but tough-talking owner of a Kansas roadside diner where travelers take refuge during a snowstorm. Three years later, in her first starring role on Broadway, “Goldilocks,” a musical comedy by Jean and Walter Kerr and the composer Leroy Anderson that also starred Don Ameche, she played a silent-film star and impressed The Times’s critic Brooks Atkinson with the acid capability of her delivery:
 
“Miss Stritch can destroy life throughout the country with the twist she gives to the dialogue,” Atkinson wrote. “She takes a wicked stance, purses her mouth thoughtfully and waits long enough to devastate the landscape.”
 
Noël Coward, one of Ms. Stritch’s devoted fans, built the 1961 musical “Sail Away” around her role as Mimi Paragon, the relentlessly effervescent hostess of a cruise ship. She repaid his trust not only by giving what Howard Taubman of The Times said “must be the performance of her career” (including a delicious rendition of Coward’s hilariously snooty “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?”) but also by successfully ad-libbing, on opening night, when a poodle in the cast betrayed its training onstage. The show was not a hit, but Ms. Stritch came away with her third Tony nomination. Her next Broadway role was in the replacement cast of Edward Albee’s scabrous portrait of a marriage, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” as Martha, the bitter, boozy wife.

One of Ms. Stritch’s most memorable appearances was in the Sondheim musical “Company” (1970), in which, as a cynical society woman, she saluted her peers with the vodka-soaked anthem “The Ladies Who Lunch.” It not only brought her another Tony nomination but became her signature tune — at least until, in her 70s, she became equally known for Sondheim’s paean to showbiz longevity and survival, “I’m Still Here.” It was the centerpiece of her 2001 one-woman show, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” and she sang it in 2010 at Mr. Sondheim’s 80th-birthday concert at Lincoln Center (Patti LuPone took on “The Ladies Who Lunch”) and at the White House for President Obama.
 
Essentially a spoken-and-sung theater memoir, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” created with the critic John Lahr of The New Yorker, began performances at the Public Theater in Manhattan (when Ms. Stritch was 76) and then moved to Broadway, where it was a smash.
 
Alone onstage except for a single chair, clad only in tights and a white silk shirt, Ms. Stritch wove together music (including “Zip,” “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “I’m Still Here” and two additional Sondheim songs: “The Little Things You Do Together,” a mordant salute to marriage from “Company,” and the aging showgirl’s lament, “Broadway Baby,” from “Follies”) and showbiz memories into a nightly tour de force that won a Tony Award for the year’s best special theatrical event.

In 2005, after nearly 60 years in show business, Stritch made her solo club act debut, appearing at New York's posh Carlyle Hotel and was brought back frequently. She lived in the Carlyle's Room 309 for a decade.

A documentary, "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me," premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival the week before she left New York, showing a feisty Stritch as she reacted with anger, frustration and acceptance at her increasingly evident mortality. Asked what she thought of the film, she replied: "It's not my cup of tea on a warm afternoon in May." The film was released in 2014.

In the recent Broadway revival of "A Little Night Music," Stritch played a wheelchair-bound aristocrat who offers dry and hysterical pronouncements in her half-dozen scenes, and mourned the loss of standards in her big song "Liaisons," in which she looked back on her profitable sexual conquests of dukes and barons. She might as well have been speaking of theater itself.

"Where is skill?" she asked. "Where's passion in the art, where's craft?"

"You know where I'm at in age?" she said backstage, in her typical wit and sass. "I don't need anything. That's a little scary — when you know that the last two bras you bought are it. You won't need any more. I'm not going to live long for any big, new discovery at Victoria's Secret."

For more stories on this legendary lady, please, please, please go here. (You will absolutely never forgive yourself if you don't ~HvR): 
 http://blog.oup.com/2014/07/in-remembrance-of-elaine-stritch/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=oupacademic&utm_campaign=oupblog
 
 

Monday, June 30, 2014

Deliciously loopy, THE FAN warns, "Think twice before sending a fan letter to Lauren Bacall."

As a youngster in 1979, I read a very suspenseful novel by playwright Bob Randall called THE FAN. It was a quite a snappy little read that was written, rather cleverly, in nothing but letters, memos, dairy pages, newspaper clippings, etc... which not only added to the fun but turned the whole affair into a mystery that swept the reader along as sort of a reluctant police detective. The novel ended with a bit of surprise for all concerned. (More on that later.)
 
From the KIRKUS REVIEW April 15th 1977
Write him two letters (fan letters), or maybe even three – Mr. Randall has written a whole novel of them, and it could be one of the catchiest items of the season. The letters here include the complaints that N.Y. apartment-dwelling actress Sally Ross gets from neighbors about nocturnal noise, and Sally's constant, chatty communiques to ex-husband Jake whom she really still loves (he married young Heidi in a moment of glandular distraction), and also the increasingly importunate writings of a fan, The Fan, someone called Douglas Breen, who works in a record store. Sally is 46 (Jake says she's being ""Gaborish'), and she has low moments when she feels that she looks like ""what's left in Grant's Tomb"" and needs cheering up from faithful secretary-friend Belle. But, to The Fan, Sally's an ""explosion of adorableness,"" and his communications become more and more insistent, even threatening. Then someone mugs and carves Belle up on a subway platform, and Sally is left quite unprotected. The police write memos to each other about the assailant that they can't identify. Is he perhaps the one who writes and writes and writes and is frightening Sally into a pill-hazed funk? Randall's collection of letterheads – half covert horror, half disarming humor – should sneak right up on you with all the ominous pleasures of reading someone else's mail.
 
In 1980 Paramount Pictures began work adapting THE FAN for the big screen starring a cast of Hollywood veterans. With Lauren Bacall, James Garner, Maureen Stapleton, Hector Elizondo and produced by Robert Stigwood, it was very clear that Paramount was not trying for a big-budget slasher picture. The atmospheric score was written by Brian DePalma favorite Pino Donaggio, while two new musical numbers (yes, musical numbers!) were composed by Marvin (A Chorus Line) Hamlisch and Tim (Chess, Evita) Rice.

SPOILER ALERT: At this time, it was also made clear that the script would retain the novel's original shocking ending where the deranged fan fakes his own death to flush the terrified star out of hiding and succeeds in killing her. (The aforementioned surprise.)

However, somewhere between the transfer from book to screenplay to local cinema, extraordinary circumstances, beyond the control of your average film studio, clearly got in the way. When in December of 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed by an obsessed fan, it was decided that the original ending to the story would be considered in poor taste, so a more upbeat, 'good triumphs over evil' ending was conceived - much to the detriment of the tale itself - turning the film into what the studio was probably trying to avoid in the first place; a very expensive 1980s formulaic slasher flick.

With her patented haughty glare, overconfident Lauren Bacall transparently thinks that she's outclassing the proceedings. An aging Hollywood glamour queen better known for her former show biz husbands and her digs in a landmark apartment building than for any of her creaky, Broadway musical "star vehicles," Bacall here is playing --- how did you know? -- precisely that. When servants sing "Happy Birthday," Bacall snaps, "As of today, I'm going to be forty-five forever." Secretary Maureen Stapleton mutters, "Forty-nine," and Bacall admits to "Fifty," but since none of these figures seem remotely plausible, it's all the stranger that young, hunky Michael Biehn sends mash notes that blather, "We'll be lovers soon and I have all the necessary equipment to make you very happy."

Stapleton writes back, admonishing Biehn's "tasteless pornography," making Biehn worry -- in voice-over, to us -- about Stapleton's "possessiveness," asking, "Has it ever occurred to you that she might have lesbian tendencies?" Bacall snarls at Stapleton, "We've had lots of weirdos. What about the guy who kept trying to jump into the taxi with me? Don't upset my fans." Stapleton (who has the upper hand because she can act) replies, "Did it ever occur to you that my job isn't exactly heaven? (meaning, presumably, costarring with Bacall) I'm a Secret Service escort, a butler, a nurse, a letter-writing machine, a floor mop . . . ten, twelve hours a day!" While we're mulling that one over -- "a floor mop"? -- Bacall simpers, "What would I do without you?"

Cue Biehn to start rampaging around with a razor, slicing up Stapleton, Bacall's maid, and even a featured dancer in Bacall's new show. Speaking of which, it should be noted that Bacall, while no singer, managed to score not one but two Tony Awards for her two musical stints on Broadway. But any clues as to why will not be found watching her sing and dance her way through THE FAN. Instead, your jaw will drop as one tough-to-top, insane routine follows another, with sparkling chorus boys praising -- in "you've never heard of 'em before, you've never heard of 'em since" tunes by Hamlisch and Rice -- the charms of the ageless Bacall. (The show is, of course, a triumph.)

Later, Biehn chases Bacall -- swathed in an evening gown -- through the empty theater. Finally he stands over her, razor in hand and Bacall snaps, "You're pathetic. Here's your chance to be like one of those hoodlums who kill their victims for nothing, a thief who murders little old ladies for a quarter. Don't you think the world's had enough of people like you? I've had it," and -- having apparently monologued him into submission -- she grabs the razor and kills Biehn, then exits the theater, heading for her opening night celebration. (
Wouldn't you?)
 
As an interesting side-note, THE FAN in its cinema, VHS, BETA, and Laser Disc incarnations includes the following voiceover line in a note left behind by Biehn to Bacall, just after the scene where he kills her maid: "Dearest Bitch, See how accessible you are? How would you like to be fucked with a meat cleaver?" For some idiotic reason, The last line was omitted from the DVD! Was this just a simple oversight or was it the powers at Paramount saying that even serial killers should be politically correct? Discuss.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

A Delicious look at Zeffirelli's ENDLESS LOVE proves that when young love is concerned, where there's smoke, there's fire - literally!

Combatting the ruins of a recent house fire (caused when my Madame Trousseau electric hairdyer 6000 decided that life had finally become unbearable and decided to go out, not with a whimper, but with a bonfire), meant dinner and dancing with husband Jim was utterly out of the question. But romance will not be damned. If we could not make sparks on the dance floor, we would make sparks in front of the dvd player. 

A recent remake of ENDLESS LOVE had me nostalgic for my younger days when I saw the original version in theaters and swooned with delight over the acting eyebrows of Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt. While there has never been an official US dvd release of the film, yours truly has her ways, and I trundled into my secret stash to find the old 1981 chestnut with the promise to Jim that getting my way was the only way that he would have his.

Filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli, hoping to reignite his lukewarm career with a swoony, romantic teen tragedy (aping his earlier smash Romeo and Juliet) only pulled off the swoony part with this misguided, hooty attempt to launch ‘70s prepubescent pinup Shields into adult stardom. Saddled with Brooke Shields and newcomer Martin Hewitt - two dreamy-looking dead weights who’d make better bookends than film stars - Zeffirelli tries, hilariously, to divert our attention from their inability to act by encouraging the film’s other players to overact up a storm. "Too much self-dramatizing around here!" snaps Beatrice Straight as if (1) she’d just come from watching the rushes, and (2) she weren’t guilty as sin herself.

The movie, a yarn about star-crossed Chicago teens who go mad when torn apart (already laughably preposterous when Splendor in the Grass was filmed twenty years earlier), throws together the son of two politically aware do-gooders with the daughter of two "free-spirits." whose home "is the joke of the neighborhood - into drugs, into everything - a relic of the ‘60s."

Earth mama Shirley Knight likes that Hewitt is spending the nights in fifteen-year-old Shields’ bedroom; she asks hippy hubby Don Murray, "Aren’t you happy that someone has the courage to wake up Sleeping Beauty?" (Shields looks to us like she’s been sleepwalking from beginning to end.) Knight explains, "He hides in the house till they think we’re asleep and he scuttles away at dawn. They’re rather sweet - like bats."

Bats is the word, all right, for the sequence where Zeffirelli whips up a veritable operatic quartet of Bad Acting: Murray screams at Shields, "I don’t want him in your room!" Shields wails, "You’re just jealous!" Knight shrieks at Murray, "You’re a hell of a doctor - she’s hysterical!" and Shields’ brother James Spader shouts "There’s something wrong with that guy!" - all at the same time.

Forbidden to see Shields (or even her nude body double), Hewitt goes off the deep end, takes the advice of arson enthusiast Tom Cruise, and sets fire to Shields’ house - taking the notion of "carrying a torch’ a tad far. Hewitt’s sent to a psychiatric hospital (where he has "visions" of Shields in earlier scenes) and, as is so often the case when a teen torches a house, the marriages of both families fall apart.

"Get me out of here!" Hewitt rages to his folks - a sentiment you’ll share before the movie’s over - so (get this) they do, and Hewitt hotfoots it to Manhattan, where he gets vamped by the divorced Knight, chased by Murray (who mercifully for us, is hit by a taxi and killed), and reunited with Shields, who hasn’t learned one single thing about acting in all the years they’ve been apart. What any of this has to do with love is anybody’s guess, but it’s certainly endless.

Needless to say, husband Jim did get lucky that evening - it was the least I could do.

 

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