Screen
Alleva, Richard
this...couldn't be applied to alcohol abuse or other potential reasons for termination of parental rights." One cannot say how the future will shape this inchoate doctrine. But who knows? There...
...It was founded in 1951 by William Christensen and Utah arts' patroness Glenn / 716: Commonweal...
...Sayles the fllmmaker seems to listen to every single complaint 6 December 1991:715 harbored by Sayles the concerned citizen...
...The production was so successful that it was taken over by the Royal Danish Ballet, the company that has kept Bournonville's heritage alive...
...City of Hope isn't trying because its vision of this country is bleak...
...Second, and even more important: neither of the duelists is deceitful or even tricky in the sexual sparring...
...Sayles's intricately structured script portrays the"city of hope" as a house of cards in collapse...
...He is her pinstriped, limousine-transported knight...
...He's never been a favorite actor of mine because he has always seemed less a human being than a walking, breathing advertisement for Rotary International...
...As long as she is willing to battle him, she remains in his view and that is, for the moment, all he wants...
...Agee went on to justify this seemingly contradictory statement by noting that the David Lean adaptation of Dickens was a skilled "translation" rather than an inspired "transfiguration" and that it failed to "run the risks that are always run when primary creative intelligence rather than the best that good taste can do is turned loose on the screen...
...You would guess wrong...
...For all the recent attention, however, Ballet West is not a new company...
...No system of vigilance is perfect...
...And, in close-ups, she is secure and commanding...
...together...
...Citing skyrocketing rents in Manhattan, diminishing funds from grant sources, and living situations that dancers are increasingly unwilling to put up with, many people conclude that the dance boom of the '70s and '80s is over...
...Ballet West burst on the national scene in the 1980s, with the production by then-director Bruce Marks ofAbdallah, a"lost" ballet of the great nineteenth-century Danish master, Auguste Bournonville (1805-79...
...Norman Jewison sends every element in the script, good or bad, whizzing by the viewer...
...Its basic unit is the lengthy tracking shot that stays on one set of characters until they walk out of the frame and another set of characters with different but related problems walk into it or are literally tracked down by the moving, hunting camera...
...None of it would work if the actors didn't deliver, but they do...
...Johnson Controls had it fight the first time...
...Though some of the legal-financial maneuvering is sharply observed and the final contending appeals to the stockholders by DeVito and Gregory Peck (as the company's scion) make for stirring oratory, the real focus of this movie is on the sexual contest between the beautiful lawyer and the Wall Street hustler...
...There may come a time when a pregnant woman, falling-down drunk after hours at a tavern, will as surely lose custody of her unborn child as would a parent who severely beats his toddler...
...But he's aged magnificently and seems to have grown into the middle-class grandeur he's always aspired to...
...She denounces him as an agent of capitalistic chaos, schemes to wreck his plans, but doesn't hold herself aloof from him...
...Other People's Money is less a work of art than a wonderfully wrapped package full of highcalorie goodies...
...For fetal protection, that means parents as the primary guardians of fetal health, with the state playing an important supporting role through workplace regulation and the development of legal doctrines...
...But, then again, isn't the manufacture of confectionery at least a minor art as well as a business...
...Neither director nor players try to mitigate this beauty-and-thebeast pairing...
...RICHARD ALLEVA DANCE GO WEST, YOUNG DANCER BALLET WEST COMES EAST t's now something ofa clich6 to say that dance in New York has fallen on hard times...
...Agee's distinctions can be echoed in regard to two new movies that examine the economic and social flaws in the way Americans live now: Norman Jewison's glib, shrewd, safeplaying, and immensely enjoyable Other People's Money and John Sayles's admirable but trying City of Hope...
...When the lawyer threatens to turn over her case to some colleague unless DeVito grants her a certain legal respite, he feels no resentment in giving way, and she feels no guilt about her manipulation of him...
...In other words, Other People's Money is a romance, a seriocomic love story merely underpinned by social concerns...
...If a basically decent white contractor-landlord yields to the pressure of a corrupt city hall and torches a poor black housing project that the venal mayor wants to turn into a condo complex, then the basically decent black councilman trying to help the victims of the arson will first establish his militant credentials by helping to frame a decent white teacher for molesting two black youths who actually roughed up the teacher...
...DeVito is...well, you've seen DeVito...
...And, to his great credit, Sayles has created a style that perfectly mirrors his theme...
...n the basis of its subject matter--the struggle of an old-line New England manufacturing company to avoid a hostile takeover by a Wall Street raider and the way that struggle is waged financially, legally, and even erotically between the raider (Danny DeVito) and the company's lawyer (Penelope Anne Miller)--you might guess that Other People's Money equals City of Hope in ambition, scope, and social inquiry...
...Different characters with different problems, all trapped within the same urban corruption, are also all trapped within the same cinematic rectangle...
...Conscientious regulation, Title VII amendments, and emerging legal trends: these are some possible safeguards for the fetus in addition to parental care...
...Why didn't the Democrats run Peck against Ronald Reagan...
...and the peculiar power imbalances of the employeremployee relationship---all strongly counsel against giving bosses anything approaching discretion in this area...
...But the week-long appearance by Salt Lake City's Ballet West at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., (October 8-13) made clear that dance in unlikely places like Utah is doing just fine, and that when it tours back East it can hold its own with the local products...
...And it works mainly because of two shrewd strategies employed by director Norman Jewison and scriptwriter Alvin Sargent (adapting Jerry Sterner's play) and executed con brio by DeVito and Miller...
...the best a society can do is to fashion as good a mix as it can consistent with its other goals and needs...
...Corporate settings notwithstanding, Other People's Money portrays courtly love in a twentieth-century permutation...
...Indeed, my heart goes out to Sayles for being so wideranging in his examination of our ills...
...Her occasional awkwardness of movement and uncertainty of how to use her hands, lends her a mild gawkiness that nicely contrasts with the cocksure aggression of her role...
...But though she doesn't hesitate to drive up the price of the stock he wants to buy and he doesn't scruple to bribe a traitor in her client's ranks, each is fair to the other when it comes to using eros as a weapon...
...Past sexist practices...
...In the star-billed but essentially supporting role of the manufacturer, Gregory Peck is wonderful...
...Penelope Ann Miller is still a novice actor (though an exceedingly promising one), but hers is a good role for a novice to play...
...he still has a good stage artist's command of volume, pause, and inflection...
...In fact, they emphasize it in as many ways as they can with extreme close-ups of the two kissing, with camera angles that emphasize the way the woman towers over the man and, most of all, in sheer emphasis through the acting, on how much DeVito lusts for Miller and how aware Miller is of the power she has over DeVito because of his short ugly man's yearning for a woman who, under normal circumstances, wouldn't even notice him, much less respond to him...
...First, the physical disparity between the erotic duelists...
...Besides the arson and the teacher's victimization, Sayles dramatizes (or at least sketches) the anomie of Nick, the contractor's son, the councilman's struggle to secure better schooling for his community's children, the indignities inflicted by and on overworked cops, the machinations of the city's D.A., who has political ambitions, the affair between Nick and a policeman's ex-wife, the councilman's happy but tested marriage, the conflict between militant black Muslims and black liberals, and--believe me--there's more, more, more...
...Danny DeVito's entire previous career has been a preparation for this role and he seizes his moment like Richard III seizing the crown...
...The injustice done to the poor breeds injustice to the middle class...
...Setting his story in a medium-sized city that seems to be a kind of compressed New York, this novelist turned cineast tries to show how the problems of whites and blacks, old and young, uncomfortably comfortable middle class and desperately workless working class are all bound "Here's your money, Sir, and I'm sure you came by it honestly...
...This movie is slick entertainment of a fairly high order...
...i= SCREEN URBAN JUNGLES 'CITY OF HOPE' & 'MONEY' hen he reviewed OddMan Out and Great Expectations upon their American release in 1947, James Agee wrote that he "enjoyed Great Expectations more than Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, but I was more interested in Reed's film and liked it more...
...White corruption spurs black corruption...
...Sayles does manage to etch some of these situations vividly but at least half of them aren't so much dramatized as semaphored...
...We've got a caseload backed up to the last Republican administration...
...She is his loophole-hunting, computer-tapping belle dame sans merci...
...It works...
...But he's got to give filmmaker Sayles a break so that the latter can take a few deep breaths, focus his attention on those problems and characters he really understands, and then create a drama that has depth as well as scope...
...This starkly contrasts with their financial-legal maneuvering that is certainly high-handed and in which neither gives quarter to the other...
...He sighs and moans and guffaws when she hoodwinks him...
...His yielding is an open tribute to her beauty, and her willingness to use his infatuation is her way of acknowledging his admiration...
...And his expert delivery of his final appeal to the stockholders reminded me that Peck first won acclaim as a stage actor...
...the biases inherent in profit-making institutions...
...I admire Concerned Citizen Sayles and share his concerns...
...Miller is sleek and fine-boned...
...But Sayles wears out his welcome with even the most sympathetic moviegoer by packing too much into his story...
...But the corporation--although it can play pivotal technical and informational roles with respect to workplace hazards--must be deprived of any but the most ministerial authority over fetal health...
...It's both topical and old-fashioned...
...Just when you're beginning to get interested in one set of characters, the writer-director seems to murmur from behind the camera, "Let's move it, kids...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 21
