Movie Review: The Main Event (1979)

Genre: Romantic Comedy  

Director: Howard Zieff  

Starring: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Patti D'Arbanville  

Running Time: 112 minutes  

Synopsis: Perfume executive Hillary Kramer (Barbra Streisand) is embezzled out of all her wealth, except her tax write-off ownership contract for boxer Eddie "Kid Natural" Scanlon (Ryan O'Neal). They immediately clash when Hillary finds Eddie cashing her cheques but retired from boxing and operating a dingy driving school. To make some money she has to convince him to get back in the ring, but Eddie is in no hurry to risk his health.

What Works Well: The production values are decent, and the few boxing scenes are glitzy.

What Does Not Work As Well: Streisand's character Hillary Kramer is a toxic combination of obtuse and insufferable, torpedoing any pretense of ability to succeed in business or love. She drowns in an ocean of attempted humour best resembling fingernails on a chalkboard, and sucks the movie into a charmless abyss. Her romance with O'Neal's boxer consists of falling into each other's arms after close to two hours of poorly-written bickering. Howard Zieff's artless directing prolongs every bad scene into an excruciating demonstration of incompetence, including sketching-in all the male characters at the Neanderthal level.

Conclusion: This bout is brain dead.



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Movie Review: Barry Lyndon (1975)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Stanley Kubrick  

Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee  

Running Time: 185 minutes  

Synopsis: In rural Ireland of the 1750s, young and penniless Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) falls hopelessly in love with his cousin Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton). But she is eventually more interested in dashing English Captain John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), and the resulting conflict forces Barry to leave his hometown. His subsequent adventures across Europe include stints in the military, a spy assignment, and a gambling partnership with Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee). A more mature Barry then decides to marry into money, and sets his sights on the wealthy Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), wife of an ailing diplomat (Frank Middlemass) and mother to an infant son.

What Works Well: Director Stanley Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott deliver a visual masterpiece, every scene constructed to evoke 18th century classic European art. Candles are often the only source of light, while thoughtful camera movements gradually reveal delightful compositions. The three hours breeze by thanks to an abundance of lush dramatic content, Kubrick adapting William Makepeace Thackeray's book with a twinkle in the eye (assisted by sly Michael Hordern narration). A game Ryan O'Neal rides the ups and downs of Redmond Barry's colourful life accompanied by a marvelous selection of classical music, including multiple variations of Handel's Sarabande. The overarching theme of overreach as a pathway to ruin plays out repeatedly in Barry's life, with ever more impressive consequences.

What Does Not Work As Well: As a quibble, it's unclear why the two seminal pistol duels are conducted with different rules.

Conclusion: An exquisitely crafted, grand, and ambitious landscape of cinematic beauty.



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Movie Review: Paper Moon (1973)

Genre: Depression-Era Dramedy

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, Madeline Kahn, John Hillerman

Running Time: 102 minutes

Synopsis: In mid-America of 1936, traveling con artist Moses "Moze" Pray (Ryan O'Neal) scours obituary notices to sell overpriced Bibles to recent widows. He attends the funeral of a barroom madame, and sensing an opportunity to make quick money, agrees to deliver her 9-year-old orphaned daughter Addie (Tatum O'Neal) to St. Joseph, Missouri. The enterprising Addie notices a family resemblance and plots to join Moze on his travels, helping increase his profits. They forge an effective petty crime combo, but their partnership is threatened by dancing girl Trixie (Madeline Kahn) then a bootlegger (John Hillerman).

What Works Well: This is a charming story of a father and daughter (?) bonding by getting themselves into ever deeper trouble. As a key twist, Addie is smarter than Moze, increasing his profitability and repeatedly yanking him out of trouble, including her elaborate ruse to torpedo Madeline Kahn's obnoxious Trixie. Bogdanovich coaxes a career highlight performance from Ryan O'Neal, and shepherds Tatum through a remarkably mature and affecting debut culminating in the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award at age ten. László Kovács' black and white cinematography captures the aura of an economically arrid time and place, while the soundtrack features big band tunes from the era.

What Does Not Work As Well: The tangle with the bootlegger and his sheriff brother (both played by John Hillerman) goes on for too long.

Conclusion: Paper Moon delights with likeable characters, stellar performances, and sleight-of-hand agility.



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Movie Review: What's Up, Doc? (1972)

A modernized screwball comedy and romance, What's Up, Doc? features no plot to speak off but an excellent cast and plenty of loony situations.

Four similar plaid handbags converge at a San Francisco hotel. Dr. Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) is an unassuming professor of musicology and his bag is filled with rocks. Bannister is attending a conference where he is nominated for a research prize, and is traveling with his domineering fiancée Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn). Mr. Smith's bag hides top secret documents, and he is pursued by Mr. Jones. The third bag contains the jewelry of a hotel guest, and she is the target of theft. The fourth bag holds the personal items of Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand).

Highly educated but completely kooky, Judy sets her sights on Howard as a romantic conquest and elbows her way into his conference program, sidelining Eunice. Howard is befuddled by Judy's behaviour as he tries to make a good impression on award sponsor Frederick Larrabee (Austin Pendleton) and fend off the boorish other nominee Hugh Simon (Kenneth Mars). Meanwhile a series of hotel room break-ins result in all four bags falling into the wrong hands, and a madcap chase.

Co-written, directed and produced by Peter Bogdanovich, What's Up, Doc? does not even try to pretend that it is anything more than an adult playground for nutty comedy of the cartoonish kind. An homage of sorts to the screwball classics of the 1940s, Bogdanovich includes even less story and less romance than expected. What's Up, Doc? has the same depth as a Bugs Bunny short, but does feature an all-in cast and one terrific highlight.

The film demands the suspension of any attempt to follow an actual narrative. Bogdanovich burns many minutes with scene after scene of characters skulking in and out of hotel rooms, as the ubiquitous plaid handbags repeatedly change locations, hiding places and hands. None of the characters are defined beyond their presence at the hotel to engage in the prevailing shenanigans, with people like Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones and the jewel thieves receiving plenty of screen time but hardly any dialogue.

But the actors fully invest in the prevailing anarchy, turning the exercise into an amusing romp. Barbra Streisand is the engine that powers events well past normal, and she nails the combination of revved-up cool, Judy laser-focused on winning Howard's heart and seemingly unaware of the commotion in her wake. As the clueless midwest professor of obscure music theories, Ryan O'Neal finds a role that suits his rather blank persona, and he provides the empty canvas for Judy to paint on. And in her full-length big screen debut, Madeline Kahn is suitably irritating as Howard's too-desperate wannabe wife.

The film's climax is a prolonged chase through the streets of San Francisco that reaches hysterical levels of madness. Bogdanovich constructs a finely crafted sequence involving a delivery bike, multiple vehicles and a Chinese dragon racing up and down the city's ridiculously steep streets, with a highlight featuring one tall ladder, two workmen and a large pane of glass.

What's Up, Doc? may lack substance, but it doubles down on pandemonium.

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Movie Review: The Driver (1978)

A minimalist chase thriller, The Driver has next to no plot but plenty of style. A sense of dark cool permeates the movie, punctuated by quite brilliant car pursuit scenes.

In Los Angeles, The Driver (Ryan O'Neal) is a mysterious man of few words who specializes in driving getaway cars for gangsters committing hold-ups. After helping a couple of criminals evade multiple police cars in a high speed chase after a casino robbery, one of the casino customers known only as The Player (Isabelle Adjani) refuses to identify The Driver, much to the disgust of The Detective (Bruce Dern).

With The Driver's reputation growing, The Detective grows more obsessed with capturing him. He sets a trap by convincing a group of low-life thugs to hire the Driver through his trusted Connection (Ronee Blakley) for a bank job that is really an elaborate set-up.

Directed and written by Walter Hill, The Driver prospers on its nothingness. Mixing film noir elements with a taut focus on three nameless people, the film thrives on a vacuum of dialogue. When The Driver and The Player speak they are limited to clipped outbursts of three to five words, and while the film often teeters on the edge of absurdity, it often lands on the right side of sleek. Most of the action takes place at night, and Los Angeles' seedier neighbourhoods have never looked this good, bathed in the lights of neon signs and car headlights.

The Driver is all the more interesting for its obvious flaws. Ryan O'Neal as the strong silent type is not as big of a disaster as he should have been. Bruce Dern's talkative, consumed detective works better for all his over-the-top colourings. And Isabelle Adjani, in her first Hollywood outing, is so dark and inexpressively pouty, probably due to a lack of comfort with the language, that she fits perfectly into the film's proudly impassive milieu.

And then Hill introduces his action set-pieces, and the film jumps into the stratosphere. There are two breathless and prolonged hyper kinetic chase showcases to open and close the film, and in the middle The Driver simply sets about carefully deconstructing a garish Mercedes as a demonstration of his abilities. Hill and cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop deliver some of the smoothest, most coherent and yet spectacular car-glorifying chases placed onto film. The sounds of roaring engines, squealing tires and police sirens emerge as easily the most dominant part of the film's soundtrack.

With an abundance of ultra-revved engines, tortured tires and over-muted characterization, The Driver is a triumph of stylistic dominance.

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Movie Review: Love Story (1970)

Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy marries girl, girl supports boy, girl dies. As straightforward as romantic tragedies get, Love Story is exactly what is says on the tin: a doomed love story, manufactured with the sole purpose of crashing a happy union onto the rocks of the ultimate calamity. Based on the best-selling book by Erich Segal, who also wrote the script, the story struck a chord and the movie became a cultural phenomenon.

Oliver Barrett (Ryan O'Neal), a rich Harvard graduate and feisty hockey player on his way to law school, meets Jennifer Cavalleri (Ali MacGraw), a spirited Radcliffe College music student. She is vivacious, artsy, and has a sharp wit that turns every conversation into a jousting match. Jenny's social background is several steps lower than the snooty Harvard class that Oliver belongs to, but this does not stop them from falling madly in love.

Oliver has a dysfunctional relationship with his stern father (Ray Milland), and Oliver's romance with Jenny does not help matters: Oliver's parents perceive her to be beneath them. Oliver becomes completely estranged from his father, and goes ahead and marries Jenny. As Oliver goes through law school, Jenny works as a teacher to support them. He graduates and takes a position with a prestigious New York law firm. All seems to be going well and they plan on starting a family, until Jenny is diagnosed with a fatal disease (likely cancer, although this is never mentioned in the film): she has very little time left to live.

Love Story has some points of irritation: for all her fresh-faced appeal Ali MacGraw's performance is almost theatrical in its grandiose delivery of every line; the famous musical love theme is over-used to distraction in the second half of the film; and Ryan O'Neal's default mode is that of the angry young man, no matter what is going on in his life.

And the infamously bad tag line "Love means never having to say you're sorry" has just gotten worse with time.

But director Arthur Hiller makes great use of Boston locations, and captures the spark of emerging love in the early scenes between Jenny and Oliver. More admirably, Love Story also takes the time to show the comforts of love and the tenderness between an established couple. A brief sofa scene with Jenny resting on Oliver while they each read a book grasps the essence of couplehood. And the scenes with Oliver's parents are deliciously uncomfortable, resonating with a mountain of never to be resolved issues between Oliver and his dad.

A cultural landmark for better or for worse, Love Story neither over-promises nor under-delivers. It is faithful to all elements necessary to create a heartbreaking romance.

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