Movie Review: Eye Of The Needle (1981)

Genre: World War Two Espionage Romantic Drama  

Director: Richard Marquand  

Starring: Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan, Christopher Cazenove, Ian Bannen  

Running Time: 112 minutes  

Synopsis: Britain-based German spy Henry "the Needle" Faber (Donald Sutherland) uncovers critical information about the upcoming Normandy landings. Pursued by Scotland Yard's Inspector Godliman (Ian Bannen), Henry escapes and eventually shipwrecks onto the secluded Storm Island. While attempting to arrange a U-boat extraction, he starts an affair with the lonely Lucy Rose (Kate Nelligan). She is the mother of a young son and stuck in a frigid marriage with the bitter David (Christopher Cazenove), who lost his legs in an accident on their wedding day.

What Works Well: The adaptation Ken Follett's novel is a well-paced mix of wartime spy action, nationwide manhunt, and passionate romance. The drama is propelled by a secret that can alter the war's outcome, and the two central performances carry the weight of responsibility: Donald Sutherland is cold blooded and supremely confident, while Kate Nelligan smolders with waiting-to-be-awakened fervor. Director Richard Marquand makes excellent use of rugged Scottish locations and builds tension towards a crackling love-versus-duty climax.

What Does Not Work As Well: Frequent knifings and plenty of plot holes compete in a race for most perforations. The police chase elements suffer from lack of character definitions and never gain meaningful traction.

Conclusion: Threads the multi-genre needle.



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The Movies Of Kate Nelligan

All movies starring Kate Nelligan and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Eye Of The Needle (1981)

The Prince Of Tides (1991)

Wolf (1994)

How To Make An American Quilt (1995)

U.S. Marshals (1998)

The Cider House Rules (1999)

Premonition (2007)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: How To Make An American Quilt (1995)

An anthology about women's diverse experiences and perspectives, How To Make An American Quilt weaves a loose narrative about a young woman at the emotional crossroads spending the summer with her great aunt's circle of friends.

Finn (Winona Ryder) is in her mid-twenties, struggling to finish her Master's thesis and engaged to be married to carpenter Sam (Dermot Mulroney). She spends the summer at the country home of her great aunt Glady (Anne Bancroft), who is part of a quilting group led by housekeeper Anna (Maya Angelou). As the lazy days unfold and the friends gets to work on a wedding quilt for Finn, she learns their personal stories.

• Finn's grandmother Hy (Ellen Burstyn) has a strained relationship with her sister Glady, stemming from a moment of weakness when Hy's husband was on his deathbed.
• Sophia (Lois Smith) is now cranky and bitter. As a young woman (played by Samantha Mathis) she was a sublime diver who fell in love and married geologist Preston (Loren Dean), but her married life did not unfold as she expected.
• Em (Jean Simmons) is married to artist Dean (Derrick O'Connor), who has always had a wandering eye.
• Constance (Kate Nelligan) first lost her dog and then her husband; her subsequent behaviour means that she is now a bit of a misfit in the group.
• As a young black servant Anna was seduced by her boss' son Beck (Jared Leto); during the resulting pregnancy she became close with Glady.
• Anna's daughter Marianna (Alfre Woodard) is a sophisticated free spirit who refused to commit to any man, but she carries one regret.
• Finn's mother Anna (Kate Capshaw) has long been divorced, but she arrives late in the summer with a new surprise.

During the summer Finn also meets the extremely hunky Leon (Johnathon Schaech), and has to decide how much the potential long term commitment to Sam means to her.

An adaptation of the Whitney Otto book directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, How To Make An American Quilt enjoys relaxed pacing and a soulful perspective. Breathing deeply from the almost resigned stance of older women looking back, often with plenty of regret, the film offers plenty of themes and talking points. The Jane Anderson script avoids pat answers and easy resolutions; this is a compendium of several lives, women defined by their decisions as life's surprises rarely align with expectations.

The film's compilation structure is both its strength and its weakness. How To Make An American Quilt never lingers in one place for too long, as no fewer than eight stories share less than two hours of screen time. Proving that every person has a good tale to tell, Moorhouse gives equal due to each vignette, and the chapters creates and hold individual mystique.

At the same time the patchwork composition is what it is: sequential short stories told with expediency, tending to emphasize melodrama to quickly get to the point. It's not a stretch to imagine all eight stories as potential material for good full length features, but here only the headlines are on display.

The performances are uniformly good from a dream cast featuring veterans Burstyn, Bancroft, Simmons, and Nelligan, as well as poet and civil rights activist Angelou. Ryder holds her own, her relative lack of subtlety finding an understandable home as an emotive young woman a generation removed from all her companions.

Ultimately the convergent narrative is the collective wisdom that Finn will take away from her summer, and How To Make An American Quilt hits a solid target with an emphasis on the unconventional. The beauty of a quilt knitted by many hands is in its lack of coherent precision, the emotions seeping across the borders achieving imperfect perfection.

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Movie Review: The Prince Of Tides (1991)

A romantic melodrama, The Prince Of Tides spares no familial agony in search of emotional scar tissue, and delivers a patchy exercise in pop psychology.

Unemployed teacher and football coach Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) of South Carolina endured a tough rural childhood, with his parents Lila (Kate Nelligan) and Henry (Brad Sullivan), a shrimp farmer, locked in a vicious cycle of spousal abuse. Tom's older brother Luke has since died, while his sister Savannah (Melinda Dillon) is depressed and suicidal. Tom is now facing a crisis of his own, with his marriage to Sally (Blythe Danner) seemingly drifting to an end due to his emotional neglect.

After another attempt by Savannah to kill herself, Tom travels to New York City to meet with her psychiatrist Dr. Susan Lowenstein (Barbra Streisand), who is trying to unlock the hidden traumas in Savannah's early life. Tom obliges, and start to reveal episodes from his childhood while falling in love with Susan. He establishes a friendship with her brooding teenage son Bernard (Jason Gould) and uncovers Susan's unhappy marriage to violin maestro Herbert Woodruff (Jeroen Krabbé).

An adaptation of the Pat Conroy novel directed by Streisand, The Prince Of Tides takes itself far too seriously as it wades into some laughable territory. There is no doubting the slick quality of the production, and Streisand constructs an elaborate journey into a thick jungle of overlapping psychological catastrophes spanning two generations. There are enough damaged souls and cracked psyches to fill an academic treatise on familial disasters, and the never ending revelations make for compelling viewing of the train wreck variety.

But the premise of a psychiatrist arm-twisting the brother of her patient into revealing childhood memories is fundamentally shaky, and the fiery hot and cold interactions between them never ring true. Tom's big breakdown scene on Susan's couch falls flat, and overall the film loses its way in pretty spectacular fashion in the final stages. The romance elements pour thick syrup over all else, and the original narrative drivers are effectively forgotten.

Regardless, there is enough value to maintain engagement. Nick Nolte delivers one of his better career performances, and Tom's excessive use of cynicism and humour to cover up a childhood of hurt is the one emotional part of the film that does work. The relationship between Tom and his wife Sally contains compelling nuggets of carnage, and more of the film should have been invested in their rocky marriage. Finally the flashback scenes are the foundations of the film and what Streisand does present is sharp and effective, but this is another aspect of Tom's story that suffers from increasing neglect as the film progresses.

A fly on the psychiatrist's wall, The Prince Of Tides is sometimes provocative but just as often cringe worthy.

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Movie Review: Premonition (2007)

A supernatural psychological drama, Premonition offers an intriguing premise but is handicapped by sloppy attempts at sappiness.

The marriage of Linda and Jim Hanson (Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon) has hit the doldrums. The passion has seeped out despite a seemingly idyllic life, two young daughters and a large house in the suburbs. Things get much worse when Linda learns that Jim has died in a fiery car crash on the highway while on a business trip. Linda's mother Joanne (Kate Nelligan) and friend Annie (Nia Long) arrive to offer comfort.

But the next day Linda wakes up and Jim is still alive. Dumbfounded, she starts to question her sanity. Other scary incidents over the coming days include one of her daughters smashing through a glass door, and a gory encounter with a dead crow. Not knowing what each new day may bring and confused over the health of her marriage and the sequence of events in her life, Linda reaches out to psychologist Dr. Norman Roth (Peter Stormare), but he may be more of a hindrance than a help.

Directed by Mennan Yapo and written by Bill Kelly, Premonition plays with the idea of a mind under stress mimicking a marriage spiralling in all the wrong directions. The film offers a puzzle built on jumbled time, and once the framework is set, all sorts of possibilities emerge. Premonition in this case is a vivid experience which may have either already happened or could still be prevented, and with the failing dynamic between Linda and Jim, she has interesting choices to make.

The theme of preordained destiny or a future potentially shaped by human decisions bubbles to the surface, and Premonition deserves credit for presenting an eternal debate through a fresh lens. The final third of the film veers towards some maudlin moments, and Linda's last-ditch attempts to save her marriage are less than convincing.

Brief but effective horror moments punctuate the film and add to the sense of unease. The encounters with the glass sliding door and the dead crow provide opportunities for gory and sharp shocks, signposts that all is clearly not well in Linda's week.

Sandra Bullock capably carries the weight of the film, mixing incredulity with determination while handling the time shifts with increasing confidence. The rest of the cast members are given relatively little to do, with Julian McMahon operating at a particularly bland television movie level.

Premonition offers decent quality and thought-provoking entertainment without necessarily reinventing the wheels of time.

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Movie Review: Wolf (1994)

The story of an American werewolf in corporate New York, Wolf shows promise as a metaphor for adults, but then loses its edge by insisting on following the childish werewolves-on-the-loose path.

Respected book editor-in-chief Will Randall (Jack Nicholson) is bitten by a wolf after a car accident in the snowy Vermont mountains. Back in New York, Will finds himself a victim of a corporate shuffle. Tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer) is the new publishing house owner, and he demotes Will and assigns young and hungry marketing executive Stewart Swinton (James Spader) into his position. Will's life hits rock bottom when he discovers his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) having an affair with Stewart.

But Will also starts to feel the after-effects of the wolf bite: his senses are amplified, he feels younger, more vigorous, and more aggressive. He meets Alden's daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer), an aloof heiress, and starts to plot his revenge to reclaim his job and make Stewart and Charlotte suffer. But then Will starts to lose control of what is happening to him at night, when the werewolf within him emerges and goes hunting for blood and adventure. A brutal murder is then committed, and Will emerges as a suspect.

Directed by Mike Nichols, Wolf tries to appeal to two distinct audiences and by doing so fails them both. The first half displays promise as an analogy of the need for an emotional rebirth to survive middle age trauma, as Nichols explores the symbolism of Will discovering and then adopting wolf-like tactics to fight for his patch of the corporate and relationship jungle.

But once the film transitions in its second half to actual werewolf adventures, howlings in the night, wolves hunting deer and eventually murder and mayhem in Central Park, it veers sharply away from its intellectual premise. With this heavyweight cast there is nothing to be gained chasing special effects, blood, gore and werewolves battling each other, complete with incompetent detectives attempting to solve murder-by-wolf.

Mayhem caused by werewolves has of course been done before many times, and with much better horror and special effects, including in 1981's An American Werewolf In London. By insisting on chasing the thrill-seeking audience Wolf loses its purpose and surrenders the cerebral advantage.

Casting Jack Nicholson as a wolf is almost too easy, but he does a fine job adopting a more-is-less philosophy. Nicholson keeps Will sharp but low-key, and remains remarkably calm even when the werewolf transformations start. Laura Alden is an interesting but underwritten role, and Pfeiffer can't do much with it. More effective is Spader as the power-hungry Stewart Swinton, a shrewd natural wolf in man's clothing.

Wolf ends up being not scary enough, not gory enough, and not smart enough, as it howls at the moon of confused objectives.

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