Sun 6 Jun 2010
From the Archives: Four Short Movie Reviews.
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[14] Comments
● ONCE UPON A CRIME. MGM, 1992. John Candy, James Belushi, Cybil Shepherd, Sean Young, Richard Lewis, George Hamilton. Director: Eugene Levy.
The lives of several Americans traveling in Europe converge in Monaco, with several or all of them eventually suspected of murder. A comedy, as if you couldn’t tell from the cast.
I was reminded of some of Inspector Clouseau’s earlier cases; Judy called it French farce. I agree, but I’d recommend this only if you can stand Richard Lewis.
● GOTHAM. Showtime, 1988; made for cable-TV. Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Denise Stephenson, Frederic Forrest. Screenwriter/director: Lloyd Fonvielle.
A down-on-the-heels PI named Eddie Mallard is hired by a man who wants his wife to stop following him around. The problem is that she has been dead for several years. A large box of jewels is also involved.
Is this a ghost story or a mystery? I’m not quite sure, and no one in the movie was either, or so it seemed to me. Jones makes a great private detective, but I lost interest about halfway through.
● SHINING THROUGH. 20th Century Fox, 1992. Melanie Griffith, Michael Douglas, Liam Neeson, Joely Richardson, John Gielgud. Based on the novel by Susan Isaacs. Director: David Seltzer.
A Brooklyn secretary, half-Irish, half-Jewish, somehow becomes a spy at the outbreak of World War II. More than that, since she knows German, she soon finds herself in Berlin trying to track down the factory making U-2 missiles.
While the first hour or so shows some promise, the second half is hardly more than one preposterous escapade after another.
● DECEIVED. Touchstone/Buena Vista, 1991. Goldie Hawn, John Heard, Ashley Peldon, Robin Bartlett, Tom Irwin. Director: Damian Harris.
After five years of being happily married, a woman’s life is shattered when she discovers that her husband, now dead in an automobile accident, had been living a lie, under someone else’s name.
First a detective story, then a thriller, the story doesn’t quite seem to know where it’s headed, but it still packs a pretty good wallop. Goldie Hawn, in a straight role, is fine. (Lots of smudged mascara.)
COMMENT: There are two movie guides that I usually take a look at after seeing a movie. (Sometimes before.) The first, by Leonard Maltin, says, “Hawn’s attempt to play it straight is too derivative (to say nothing of incredible) to carry much clout.” The other, by Steven H. Scheuer, says, “Well-acted, especially by Hawn who’s rock solid…”
What does Maltin say about Melanie Griffith, in Shining Through? “Empathic performance by Griffith make(s) this palatable…” As for Scheuer: “Griffith is thoroughly unbelievable…”
These guys (or whoever’s writing for them) are obviously not seeing the same movies. (Are they on the same planet?)
[UPDATE] 06-06-10. According to my records, I actually wrote these reviews in September of 1993. Do I remember watching any of four? No, only the briefest of scenes come back to me from any of them.
I’m sure I still have these on video cassette, taped from the various premium movie channels we’d signed up for at the time. I’d be most anxious to give Gotham another try, if I could find it. It sounds like my kind of movie.
Maltin, of course, is still around. Scheuer stopped doing his movie guide in 1993, but he started in 1958, long before Maltin was old enough to vote. (He was eight at the time.) What the varying opinions demonstrate is that it never hurts to have two points of view on a movie. When two such devoted film critics as Siskel and Ebert can have diametrically opposed takes on one — many times over — it’s obvious that there can be no such thing as 100% agreement on how good (or bad) a movie is.
June 6th, 2010 at 7:26 am
Not only can’t I stand Richard Lewis for more than a minute or two, but I have never been able to understand Jim Belushi having a career. How long to we need to do penance for his brother’s death?
Retire already!
June 6th, 2010 at 7:32 am
On the other hand I love John Candy.
Steve, let me highly recommend Maltin’s 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen. (I think I discovered it on Bill Crider’s blog.) I made a list of 20 or so titles that sounded particularly interesting – several of which I’d never heard of despite big-name casts and/or directors – and we’re working our way through those the library has on hand. So far we’ve seen Driving Lessons, The Last Shot (which was a hoot) and The Devil’s Backbone.
I had actually seen a number of his choices but there were plenty of new (to me) entries. He has mostly small, independent films, mostly from the last 10 or 20 years.
June 6th, 2010 at 7:37 am
We did watch Shining Through some years ago because we’d read the book by Susan Isaacs, but with Melanie Griffith miscast it was as weak as I’d expected – watchable, but weak. But then it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as when she followed it up by playing a tough homicide detective undercover as a Hasidic woman in A Stranger Among Us.
June 6th, 2010 at 8:13 am
One last comment: I can still remember Paul Rudnick’s characterization (as “Libby Gelman-Wexner”) in Premiere magazine of A Stranger Among Us as “Debbie and the Rebbe.”
June 6th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Re Jim Belushi, I certainly don’t feel as strongly about his acting abilities as you do, but maybe that’s because my exposure to him (and them) has been low.
Looking on IMBD at the list of movies he’s been in, most of them I’ve never heard of. Nor have I watched any of the TV shows he’s been on.
On the other hand, I started my review of MADE MEN (1999) with the sentence, “I found James Belushi’s performance in this fine shoot-em-up comedy crime caper to be a work of art, and I’m not kidding.”
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=893
Doing comedy takes a special talent, and what some people find funny, others find screechingly awful. Richard Lewis and I are not related, I don’t believe.
Dan Roberts, the paperback collector and a good friend of mine, while taking a short automobile trip together, once asked me who I thought the funniest comedian was.
Caught by surprise, it took me maybe 10 seconds to reply. Jonathan Winters, I said.
Me, too, Dan agreed, also surprised. He thought talking over the question would cover the next 30 miles, and all we had left to discuss were all of the runners up.
Jonathan Winters could crack me up just by walking onto the stage.
June 6th, 2010 at 11:43 am
PS. I’ll keep an eye out for the Maltin book. Thanks for the tip! If I don’t get to Borders today (33% discount coupon in hand), I’ll see what it goes for on Amazon.
June 6th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Of these four films one is unique — I actually set all the way through GOTHAM. The other three (all four seen on cable) were turned off pretty early in the process, and in the case of SHINING THROUGH having read the Susan Issacs book was another mark against it.
Re Maltin, when he’s good he is great and when he is off he is 100% off, but at least he usually tells you enough that once you know his taste you can tell for yourself whether to go with him or not.
Reviews can never be much more than a guide, and a subjective one at that, but at least they give you an idea what you might see.
I don’t think I have a single favorite comic. It depends on the mood and the kind of comedy you mean — monologue, sketch, acting … Johnathan Winters though is one of the greats, and has a special place in the mystery genre. As you probably know Mickey Spillane did a little short pilot film for his buddy ex cop Jack Spang to play Mike Hammer, and if you look quick Jonathan Winters is in it as the informer Hammer roughs up. Stills from the short film, including a shot of Winters, are available in the Spillane anthology TOMORROW I DIE.
Though I was just a kid I still recall Winters from his appearances with Jack Parr — probably much of it went over my head, but it was still damn funny.
June 6th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Hey, Jeff. Jim Belushi has already landed another series. THE DEFENDERS in which he’s a Vegas lawyer. Any relation to E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed’s series will be purely coincidental.
June 6th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
I saw that, Ray. To be honest I don’t dislike him and have seen him in a couple of movies where he’s been pretty good. Wasn’t he in a Schwarzenegger movie?
But his TV series was (to me) unwatchable. The fact it lasted so many years says something (again, to me) about the American public.
Did anyone really find it funny?
Yes, Jonathan Winters is funny but I’ve always found him too calculating to be hilarious (if that is understandable).
Who makes me laugh? W. C. Fields, Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Schimmel, Robin Williams (I know he thinks of himself as a protege of Winters), to name four.
June 6th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Jeff, I like all four, so no argument, especially Robin Williams, who is almost as brilliant as he thinks he is.
As for Belushi, there will — sadly — always be a part for the big buffoon that Hollywood thinks is the everyday average American doofus. The fact that most of us wouldn’t put up ten minutes with a character like Belushi plays has nothing to do with it. In the eyes of Hollywood he is the average American — big, dumb, loud, crude, and yet ultimately good hearted.
It’s a stereotype, and Belushi is the current poster boy for it, and likely the next one will be even more obnoxious, and it does no good to protest, this is what Hollywood thinks middle America is like Jim Belushi, Ed O’Neill, Tom Arnold, and Randy Quaid with the rare Tom Hanks, James Stewart, or Henry Fonda as our moral compass.
I suppose it could be worse, they used to think we were Ma and Pa Kettle.
Belushi is in JINGLE ALL THE WAY, a brassy loud and not very funny Christmas movie with ‘Ahnold’ that is mostly notable for wasting the late Phil Hartman, and proving just how unfunny Sinbad can be.
That said, even Belushi has been good in a few things, and somehow that last awful series lingered on and on — so somebody watched it.
And while it is anathema to say it, other than a few iconic roles I wasn’t that big a fan of his brother John, an actor who could be very funny (ANIMAL HOUSE) and equally very annoying (1941) and whose film and television career always seemed to be equally divided between the two extremes. That’s not to say his death wasn’t a tragedy, but I’ve always thought critics found his output much funnier once he was gone than their reviews suggested they found them while he was alive.
And to mention another dead fat comic, I’ve had toothaches more entertaining than Chris Farley — in anything.
But then I have the silly rule about comics — I require them to be funny — not just loud, crude, rude, and obnoxious, which eliminates 90% of screen comedy today.
June 7th, 2010 at 6:29 am
Your old reviews come back to haunt you. I actually enjoyed SHINING THROUGH quite a lot, though I can find little to recommend it.
June 7th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Dan
Any old reviews that are either too embarrassing or show off my ignorance too much, you’ll never see them here, have no fear about that!
— Steve
June 7th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Getting back to Jeff’s comment about Jonathan Winters, I certainly don’t see him as “too calculating,” not in the sense of Bill Maher, say, who seems to pause knowingly when he’s about to say something both clever and outrageous. (Sometimes he’s even right, on one or the other or both.)
I remember Jonathan Winters getting a certain glint in his eyes whenever he went off in a totally improvised and off-the-wall routine, and perhaps that’s what you’re referring to as calculating.
I think his funniest stuff was when he was totally ad-lib.
Or what I’ve always assumed to have been ad-lib.
Amazingly, as nuch of a fan of his as I am, I have just discovered that he had his own show on CBS for two years (1967-1969). I don’t remember ever seeing it. Where was I?
And, David, I’m with you regarding John Belushi and Chris Farley — and almost every other actor in what passes for comedy film-making today.
— Steve
June 7th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Steve
Like you I don’t know if I would call Jonathan Winters calculating, but sometimes the ad libbed material could feel a bit forced, as if he was trying too hard to live up to his reputation. Not often, mind you, but once in a while later in his career — and it’s a trap for any comic doing that kind of off the wall humor.
You get the same feeling with some of Chaplin’s later work — a self awareness of his own genius that starts to sabotage the sense of improvisation that made it genius in the first place. Some comics like Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman actually make a career of that uncomfortable territory, but I can’t say either is a favorite for that reason.
But you can’t argue about what one person finds funny and another doesn’t. I know people who will tell you PORKY’S is the funniest film ever made and fall asleep watching Laurel and Hardy. Huge numbers of people actually thought DUMB AND DUMBER was funny — or else believed what they were told.
Comedy is pretty much whatever you laugh at, even if no one else gets the joke.