Movie Review: The Bride Goes Wild (1948)

An unbalanced romantic comedy, The Bride Goes Wild has no idea what it is trying to be and collapses in an inept heap.

Prim and proper schoolteacher Martha Terryton (June Allyson) wins a competition to be the illustrator for the latest children's book by celebrated author "Uncle Bumps", the pen name of Greg Rawlings (Van Johnson). Publisher McGrath (Hume Cronyn) knows that contrary to his reputation, Greg is a womanizing borderline alcoholic, still recovering from a long-ago failed relationship with Tillie (Arlene Dahl).

When Greg clumsily attempts to seduce Martha and plies her with alcohol, McGrath fears a scandal, and concocts a plot to elicit sympathy for Greg by creating a fake sob-story about the author as a single dad raising an unruly child. Young freckled kid Danny (Butch Jenkins) is plucked from an orphanage and asked to play the role of Greg's out-of-control son. Martha starts to fall for Greg, but the reappearance of Tillie complicates matters.

The film is as unstable as the synopsis suggests. The third teaming of Allyson and Johnson is devoid of charisma and chemistry, and frequently veers into obnoxious territory. The character of Greg Rawlings is a singularly irritating predator, and somehow writer Albert Beich doubles down on the loathsome behaviour by contriving the ludicrous introduction of the shin-kicking Danny.

Other than perpetuating the mythology that every bad man just needs a good woman to achieve a remarkable reformation, why a wholesome schoolteacher like Martha would ever fall for a lech like Greg is only explained in the minds of Beich and director Norman Taurog. Matters are made worse when Tillie reappears, clearly a better match for Greg, but yet somehow the romance between Greg and Martha has to blossom among the thorny weeds of bad behaviour.

The Bride Goes Wild (the title has nothing to do with the events in the film) ends with ants overrunning a wedding and then stunningly awful and prolonged scenes of hordes of kids pretending to be Indians. Almost bad enough to be good due to the utter lack of cohesion, the film just settles for a putrid type of awful.

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Movie Review: Batteries Not Included (1987)

A Steven Spielberg produced family friendly science fiction drama, Batteries Not Included features cutesy aliens and cool special effects, as well as bloated emotions, superficial characters and a flimsy plot.

In a derelict corner of East Village, Manhattan, an entire neighbourhood of old buildings has been purchased and razed to the ground as ruthless developer Lacey plans to build a clutch of new highrises. One old building still stands in the way, and Lacey has hired local thug Carlos (Michael Carmine) and his gang to pay off or scare away the few remaining tenants. The holdouts include elderly couple Frank and Faye Riley (Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy), struggling artist Mason (Dennis Boutsikaris), pregnant woman Marisa (Elizabeth Peña) and handyman Harry (Frank McRae).

With Carlos becoming more violent in his methods to forcibly evict the tenants, Frank fervently hopes for some kind of intervention and two miniature friendly spaceships arrive to help. The mechanical aliens have the ability to repair anything, fight off aggressors and even reproduce. The residents are empowered by their new allies to stand their ground, forcing Carlos and Lacey to pursue even more desperate measures.

A mash-up of Cocoon, E.T. and a scaled down version of the alien spaceship from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Batteries Not Included is too intent on pushing facile emotional buttons to register with anyone over 12. Directed by Matthew Robbins and closely following the Spielberg whimsical playbook but lacking any genuine depth, the film generally gags on its own sugar level.

The characters fighting eviction are a contrived multi-ethnic collection of lovables whose only purpose is to play stoic victims. Frank runs an old-style cafe located in the building, while his dotty wife Faye is exhibiting signs of dementia and always calling out for her absent son Bob. Mason's girlfriend has just walked out on him, Marisa is hoping against hope that her musician boyfriend and father of her child will return to her. Of course Mason and Marisa, both abandoned, start a relationship. Harry is a former boxer, recluse and television addict. He rarely speaks and when he does all his sentences are television advertising slogans.

All that is relevant about the characters is revealed in the first 15 minutes, and they are then frozen in time as the cute machines dominate the rest of the film. The robots are adorable and the special effects are good for the era, but the film feels more like a manipulative advertisement for toys than a serious attempt at family-oriented drama.

The bad guys are all bad, and the script fails to ever explain why a developer with the deep pockets and resources of Lacey would ever resort to blatant goonery to evict a building.

Veteran couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy deliver reliable performances, but they are way above the material. The batteries may not be included, but the film nevertheless oozes icky acid.

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The Movies Of Hume Cronyn

All movies starring Hume Cronyn and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Shadow Of A Doubt (1943)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

The Bride Goes Wild (1948)

Cleopatra (1963)

The Parallax View (1974)

The World According To Garp (1982)

Brewster's Millions (1985)

Batteries Not Included (1987)

The Pelican Brief (1993)

Marvin's Room (1996)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Parallax View (1974)

With the high-profile assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the previous dozen years, the attempt on the life of Governor George Wallace in 1972, corruption oozing out of the Nixon White House and deep mistrust of the government over the Vietnam War, conspiracy theories were mainstream in the early 1970s. The Parallax View is a botched attempt to confirm that, indeed, government-sponsored assassin teams are crawling all over the landscape killing people to serve some unstated but clearly evil purpose.

Newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is covering Independence Day celebrations at the Seattle Space Needle when Senator Charles Carroll is assassinated. A judicial commission concludes that the gunman acted alone. Three years later fellow reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) visits Frady and insists that her life is in danger: six other people who were also present at the Space Needle have since mysteriously died. Soon enough, Carter herself is dead.

Frady, a former alcoholic, starts to investigate despite the misgivings of his editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn), and travels to the small town of Salmontail, where a judge who witnessed the Carroll assassination supposedly drowned while fishing. After tangling with the local sheriff's department Frady uncovers evidence of something called The Parallax Corporation, seemingly a recruitment organization for assassins. As Frady delves further into the events surrounding the Carroll murders and Parallax, he becomes a target until he fakes his death and applies to Parallax himself under an assumed identity.

The Parallax View stumbles badly and early as any semblance of an intellectual approach is quickly ditched in favour of abject and random mayhem completely at odds with the film's premise. Supposedly surgically precise killing teams get sloppy in a hurry. Explosions become common: both a boat and an airplane are destroyed by messy bombs that don't seem to raise any interest from police authorities. A plot to murder Frady is hatched and clumsily bungled at a remote dam site. And The Parallax View suffers from reporter-becomes-superhero syndrome: Frady can out-punch a sheriff's deputy, drown the sheriff, tail a professional assassin all around town without being noticed, and survive three separate attempts on his life, almost comically reappearing unscathed at the office of his newspaper editor after every brush with death.

The film does not even begin to offer theories on what is motivating all the killing. A lot of screen time is invested working up the six other murders related to Senator Carroll's assassination, but no explanation is ever provided for any of the actual or attempted killings. This is a likely intentional underlining of the all-powerful-dark-forces-getting-away-with-anything premise, but it also smacks of lazy film-making: allow the bad guys to kill at their leisure without the burden of explaining themselves.

Amidst the dropping bodies and gaping plot holes, Warren Beatty meanders through the film attempting to act cool but appearing mostly disinterested. His lack of emotional reaction to all the violence comes across as a robotic detachment from the evil supposedly surrounding him, and combined with his remarkable survival skills make Joe Frady a character that can only exist on paper.

Director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis almost succeed in keeping the film interesting with some excellent framing, dynamic angles and some terrific camera placements, the scenes at the Seattle Space Needle, on-board the threatened airliner and at the auditorium where the film climaxes being particular highlights.

Conspiracies only work when less is known about them. The Parallax View attempts to keep the shrouds dark, dusty and menacing. Instead, it stumbles on cheap carpet and falls flat into the harsh light.

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