Screen
O'Brien, Tom
Screen SAVING HUMORS THE AFTERTASTE OF SUMMER Two FINAL NOTES on summer .movies: The best was not a studio feature but the space documentary, The Dream is Alive [ Commonweal, August 9] made...
...Against convention, she resists his advances...
...And like Rambo himself, he's in love with his knife...
...It's just that I don't want to...
...Compromising Positions offers instead a suburban feminine version of that great-chain-of-being: Here's an Italian, a pediatrician's wife (Mary Beth Hurt), given to Laura Ashley interiors...
...Arriving in Thailand, Hanks candidly describes himself as "the ugly American" and openly declares his unsympathies for the natives...
...But there is a different ingredient to Rambo' s success, and it deserves noting...
...But of course there is one group that has never benefited from such charitable explaining and excusing: the white, mostly male, bourgeoisie...
...Sarandon's lawyer husband (Ed Hermann) stagily berates his wife for investigating the murder and neglecting household duties, thus conforming, for the most part, to that stereotype of the ponderous eighties villain, the Male Chauvinist Pig.»Hermann sometimes sounds convincing, as if, in Isaacs's mind at least, a real division of labor issue actually may exist under certain circumstances...
...The film is a cartoon-like satire on the idealism of the early sixties that partly adopts the vision of its wise-guy hero, Lawrence Bournemoth (Tom Hanks, of Splash...
...Its success has become a favorite topic for the intellectual contemptus mundi...
...No better image sums up Stallone's strategy than Rambo's semi-crucifixion while hung by ropes in a pool of dung...
...The Dream is Alive puts 2007, 2070, and all Star Wars films to absolute shame...
...On this level, Volunteers is the latest media expression of the post-Vietnam satire which — beginning with Saturday Night Live and continuing through Prizzi' s Honor — reduces all heroic postures to pretense...
...Fortunately, Isaacs's feminism leads to some novel twists...
...militarism no less than idealism takes its lumps...
...a sassy, sensual, Southern divorcee and sculptress (Judith Ivey...
...Despite the predictability of some of its material, Compromising Positions almost manages to pull off a hilarious whodunit...
...Isaacs and director Frank Perry use this kinky farce to give Long Island suburbia a kind of wacko, backhanded homage...
...At the core of Volunteers, there is sentiment, and perhaps the wish that everything since 1962 could be undone...
...Sarandon discovers his "compromising" Polaroids of his lovers (her friends...
...The summer's biggest money maker, meanwhile, was Rambo [ Commonweal, June 21] — not only in America but in places like Beirut...
...The liberal-left has so often pleaded with Americans to see things in context, particularly the excesses of liberation fronts, popular revolutionaries, criminals with bad childhoods, and even the Soviets, for whom the context of Russian history provides a whole set of moral excuses...
...He presented him as a victim...
...What Compromising Positions needs is more variety and a bettef end...
...Rambo appeals to a large, male (and, initially at least), American audience because it articulates their sense of victimization...
...The answer, in part, is its technical virtuosity, and, of course, the appeal of violent action by a grim hero, a mixture that has always had its own cinematic (and sadistic) magic...
...As Hanks gradually comes to care about building the bridge, he realizes that he has to blow it up: both the guerrillas and the CIA (in league with the local opium lord) want to use it for their own purposes...
...It will be playing for several years at major cultural institutions throughout the country (such as the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, and the Detroit Science Center...
...If instead of lowering the minimum wage for students, we increase the minimum wage to a realistic level, the concept of comparable worth should be truly irrelevant...
...the whodunit simply peters out...
...Hanks plays a Brahmin from Yale who joins the Peace Corps to escape gambling debts that Dad (George Plimpton, in a fine cameo) refuses to pay off...
...Between Rambo and the left lies the broad middle, where comedy — and lack of commitment — remains king of our time...
...Comedy spares no one...
...To the Editors: The League of Women Voters strongly supports comparable worth ["Women, Work and the Question...
...Stallone did not present Rambo like John Wayne or, for that matter, Patton...
...Once, looking up at him, Hanks tartly observes, "Has your jaw gotten any bigger?' ' But in Volunteers, as opposed to Rambo, the betrayer is right-wing...
...His ail-American gusto is, however, soon transformed into Maoism — not exactly an uncommon occurrence in that era...
...The good dentist, it seems, was involved in pornography...
...This marriage of new minds may be bourgeois, but it considerably deepens the meaning of the film's title...
...TOM O'BRIEN Commonweal: 500 (Continued from page 482) of wage that meets today's cost of living, why does the job exist at all...
...Rambo triumphs not as an expression of American community (like Wayne in so many John Ford movies), but as an expression of individual guerrilla war against "them...
...As the Kwai-like explosions take place, we are left with this germ of wisdom and the image of an Asian village saved from two sets of marauders...
...As the bumptiously energetic engineer, Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, John Candy (Hanks's co-star in Splash) mugs his role with cornpone sincerity...
...It'snotthatlcan'thelpthesepeople,"hedrawls...
...Fortunately for Sarandon, the plot thickens: When the dentist is murdered, she gets the bug to investigate and turns into the local, Tupperware version of Woodward and Bernstein...
...YVONNE M. ELIAS What salary reflects New York, N.Y...
...The satiric zest of the film fails about half-way through...
...Better still, the conclusion clarifies what the middle merely suggests: Hermann learns to be supportive...
...He was careful to portray Rambo's violence as reactive to provocation, both Communist cruelty and betrayal by American liberals, personified by a smooth-talking, squarejawed congressional aide...
...Judith Ivey's naughty one-liners, after initially astonishing with their vigor and earthiness, become boringly one-note...
...Hanks is a proto-yuppie, born either too late or too soon...
...a talky, anxious Irish Catholic matron in a bit of a scandal...
...20 September 1985: 499 Volunteers' style is firmly ironical, filled with references to The Bridge On the River Kwdi (the Peace Corps project in Thailand involves some rural bridge building) and Lawrence of Arabia (when Hanks finally participates in the project, for the wrong reasons, the natives joyfully chant "Lawrence, Lawrence," mocking a scene from that other David Lean epic...
...Her body — which Burt Lancaster voyeuristically drooled over in Atlantic City — is here subordinated to her face, comically plastic and well exploited for wide-eyed naivete...
...For all the "Americana" in recent films, Isaacs's Long Island is freshly comic, a banal mix of Burger Kings, aerobics centers, glitzily overdecorated domestic interiors, and — at the center of the mystery — the dark hand of the Mob...
...Its great strength is the performance of Sarandon, who used to be cast as a femme fatale, but here does wonders as an Tve-still-got-it-in-me housewife...
...Captured by Communist guerrillas who threaten him with brainwashing, Candy even manages to pull off the line, "You'll get nothing from me but my scorn...
...The mandatory "chopper" scene contains music composed as if in parody of the score of Stallone's heroic helicopter exploits...
...Repudiating their vision of "progress" for the locals, one of the volunteers explains, "The Peace Corps likes to help people, not change them...
...One may, of course, regard such feelings as absurd, but the feeling is there, and I doubt mockery will reduce it...
...The film also tries to say something novel about marriage but only succeeds at the close...
...OLD ARMY films often represent a cross section of America: each platoon has its obligatory Italian from Brooklyn, Jew from Jersey, hayseed from Minnesota, and WASP from Yale...
...Sarandon wants to keep him and the kids...
...Despite its promotional flavor about the space shuttle, the film leaves you enthralled by the most spectacular visual images of space flight ever seen...
...and finally a former newspaper reporter (Susan Sarandon), who gave up her career to marry a corporate lawyer...
...Screen SAVING HUMORS THE AFTERTASTE OF SUMMER Two FINAL NOTES on summer .movies: The best was not a studio feature but the space documentary, The Dream is Alive [ Commonweal, August 9] made especially for the IMAX giant screen projection (about forty by forty feet...
...Ultimately, Volunteers tries to say more, but Hanks's arrogant frankness about benign neglect could stand as the ultimate eighties slogan...
...To me, more interesting than Rambo, or even the enthusiasm shown for it in quarters like the White House, is the kind of disdain for such movies that guarantees the loss of popular audiences, and even popular elections...
...Mary Beth Hurt, whose demureness and ability with kitchen utensils makes her a good suspect, is sadly underused...
...As Sarandon becomes increasingly involved in the case, she engages the attention — first, angry, then seductive — of a handsome detective (Raoul Julia...
...After solving the mystery and turning in a story to Newsday, Sarandon sits at her typewriter, hard at work at home...
...when he sees his fellow volunteers singing "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," he deadpans, "So this is hell...
...Indeed, there are also ironic, though unintentional references to Rambo as well...
...Fortunately, Volunteers does manage to say something intelligible, and even useful, about the early Peace Corps and some of the mistakes of the sixties...
...Indeed, there is a strange, ironic resonance between Rambo and an amusing late summer comedy about Americans in Southeast Asia, Volunteers...
...The CIA operative (Tom Thomerson) almost exactly resembles the "Judas" figure in Rambo with his square-jawed certainty...
...The same people who wonder how Ronald Reagan could ever have been elected wonder how such a film could do so well...
...the Jewish wife of a dentist who philanders with his patients...
...Screenwriter Susan Isaacs, adroitly adapts her own novel with a sharp eye for local detail...
...In Compromising Positions, the ingenue detective motif merges with contemporary feminism to produce some provocative, complex truths...
Vol. 112 • September 1985 • No. 16
