On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen SUMMER FARE by robert asahina the prospect of ogling Julie Andrews' bare breasts thrills you, then go see S. O. B. But if, as I suspect, the possibility strikes you as more tiresome...
...This go round the filmmakers have wisely decided to soft-pedal the hardware that has cluttered recent installments of the longrunning series (particularly Moonraker...
...The year is 1997...
...than any of the characters he puts down...
...The script by Yabo Yablonsky and Evan Jones has a few holes, but they do not prevent John Huston's crisp, assured direction from making Victory a satisfying summertime show...
...As the teenagers fall silent, the camera slowly pans around the room and zeroes in on David Axelrod (Martin Hewitt), Jade's 17-year-old boyfriend...
...And, true to the conventions of the genre, the game and the movie climax in a rousing finale...
...It isn't, though, for Felix's crass exploitation of his spouse is matched by Edwards...
...Following his big solo, Hugh relaxes with Jade on his lap while the musicians start in on a mushy ballad—the title song by Lionel Richie, which sounds exactly like "Evergreen," the soggy tune from A Star is Born...
...Andrews plays Sally Miles, a wholesome movie star whose filmmaking husband, Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), tries to kill himself when his latest production, featuring his wife, bombs with the critics and at the box-office...
...There is also a comical car chase spoofing the tire-squealing that has become a cliche of action films...
...In an effort to disguise the inauthentic sets, Carpenter has shot most of the scenes at night, thus creating a spurious expressionist aura that has already impressed some gullible critics...
...Endless Love, are unlikely to rave—except in anger—about Franco Zeffirelli's screen version from a script by Judith Rascoe...
...Zeffirelli captures none of the book's brooding depth, only what he thinks are its outward manifestations: longing gazes, sighs, nude love scenes...
...Pappy Hugh (Don Murray), playing trumpet along with a local rock band, is entertaining a crowd of teenagers...
...The violins swell...
...The most refreshing quality of For Your Eyes Only is the diminished scale of Bond's heroics...
...The film errs by telling the story Iron) the third instead of the first person...
...Six years and three more disasters (Wild Rovers, The Carey Treatment and The Tamarind Seed) were to intervene before he recovered his bankability, if not his critical stature, with The Pink Panther Strikes Again...
...Shields is so wooden-faced that she seems less an object of desire than just an object, and Hewitt is little better...
...Naturally, the Russians are trying to beat him to it, and others get in his way as well, including a treacherous double agent and (what else...
...William Holden is appropriately cynical in the part of a hard-drinking hack director...
...To be sure, Victory is hardly up to the standards of The Great Escape or King Rat—not to mention The Grand Illusion...
...From his relentlessly subjective viewpoint, the book then slowly reveals the passion that overwhelmed David during his subsequent confinement in a series of mental institutions...
...A plane carrying the President (Donald Pleas-ance) is sabotaged and forced to crash-land near the abandoned, graffiti-covered World Trade Center...
...What is described quickly on the page thus assumes undue importance on the screen and takes up an inordinate amount of the running time...
...The former soccer great happily does not have to pretend on the field, and his athletic skills have never been exhibited to better effect than in the sequence where he does a back flip and kicks the ball over his head into the net...
...Regrettably, Director John Carpenter never really develops the metaphor, and the film soon becomes a mediocre action affair with unremarkable special effects, stunts and performances...
...Still, there are some enjoyable performances in S. O.B...
...The 11alian director, best known for his risible romanticism in such soft-focus spectacles as Romeo and Juliet, has turned a story of obsessive, destructive desire into a tale of sweetly crazed puppy love...
...Judging from this film, he must bea bigger S.O.B...
...Robert Preston is hilarious as a high-priced Hollywood sawbones...
...the fire itself doesn't occur until an hour has passed...
...There's a big party at the But-terfields' rambling house in Chicago...
...The premise of the earlier films—that the fate of the world hinged on the actions of a lone agent from a second-rate power—was always a little difficult to swallow...
...Vscape from New York should be fun, too, but it isn't...
...Perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of Britain's declining status, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson's script assigns Bond the comparatively humble task of recovering a top-secret computer from a sunken intelligence-gathering ship...
...The biggest problem with the production seems to have been a budget too slender to permit location filming...
...So when Andrewsas-Sally exposes herself in the movie-within-the-movie, it is supposed to be akin to the dizzying mixture of fiction and reality that makes, say, Sunset Boulevard such nasty fun...
...The best one is a literal cliff-hanger, with a bad guy knocking out the pitons securing Bond's rope to a sheer cliff one by one as he bounces like a Yo-Yo...
...Neither performer appears to have experienced, imagined, or even read about the emotions they are supposed to be suffering...
...To pass the time, the POWs have organized a soccer league, and one day a German officer (Max von Sydow), himself a former soccer star, proposes a match between captors and captives...
...Everything worksout in theend, needless to say—and that can also be said for an amusing dig at Margaret Thatcher just before the final credits roll...
...Those of us who often despair about the sorry condition of New York will be grimly amused by the conceit of Manhattan as a prison...
...a beautiful woman with problems of her own (Carole Bouquet, last seen in Luis Bunuel's 77ia/ Obscure Object of Desire...
...Off-screen, of course, Andrews is married to Blake Edwards, the writer/ director/producer of S.O.B...
...But they have not stinted on the hair-raising stunts that are an 007 trademark...
...The combination of bad acting, inept writing and incompetent directing make Endless Love endlessly embarrassing...
...Fans of Scott Spencer's novel...
...Earlier we had already been shown what she is describing, as well as her watching it...
...Caine, Stallone and von Sydow, although not called upon to execute anything so strenuous, are all properly stiff-lipped and heroic...
...What happened up to the time of the arson is related only in flashbacks and in letters, and with good reason—the events themselves are less important to the story than David's feelings about them...
...and Robert Webber's flustered, over-the-hill publicist is good...
...the young lovers gaze at each other...
...Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Pele play Allied prisoners in a German camp during World War II...
...In desperation, the police send in Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell), himself a convicted criminal, to rescue the President...
...Louis...
...The President survives, only to be taken hostage by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), who demands freedom for himself and his fellow prisoners in exchange for the Chief Executive's life...
...Nobody does it better than Bond (or so the song goes), and he's back for the umpteenth time, in For Your Eyes Only...
...Nothing else in the movie is handled with any greater subtlety...
...From the obviously phony Trade Center to the cut-rate 42nd Street Public Library, Escape From New York betrays the fact that it was shot in St...
...After his suicide attempts are frustrated by a series of supposedly funny accidents, he hits upon the idea of recouping his losses by reshooting the G-rated musical to give audiences and reviewers what he believes they really want: an X-rated extravaganza, complete with Sally in a nude scene...
...No one, however, comes off as badly as Edwards...
...In case you didn't get the Freudian significance of that maneuver, Zeffirelli hammers it home repeatedly, and at one point Rascoe even has Jade helpfully interpret her behavior: "1 wasn't Pap-py's little girl any more...
...Among those present are his wife, Anne (Shirley Knight), and three adolescent children, Keith (Jimmy Spader), Sammy (Ian Ziering) and 15-year-old Jade (Brooke Shields...
...A much more successful entertainment is Victory, an old-fashioned escape movie in both senses of the word...
...In a scene that is superficially faithful to the text, for example, Anne tells David how she felt when she accidentally stumbled upon him and Jade making love...
...The idea is promising...
...On Screen SUMMER FARE by robert asahina the prospect of ogling Julie Andrews' bare breasts thrills you, then go see S. O. B. But if, as I suspect, the possibility strikes you as more tiresome than titillating, then don't bother with this tepid satire...
...In one particularly awkward moment the least experienced actor, Pele, delivers the most important line—the improbably successful plea that the POWs finish the match rather than take advantage of the escape that has been arranged for them during halftime...
...Unfortunately, Robert Vaughn (the closet-transvestite studio head), Loretta Swit (a gossip-monger cloned from Rona Barrett) and especially Mulligan are all clownish and awkward...
...Seekers of correspondences will also remember that in 1969 Edwards wrote, directed, produced, and starred his wife in the total flop entitled Darling Lili...
...One of the scenes would have been enough...
...The role of the Sue Mengers-like shark is portrayed by Shelly Winters with a restraint—yes, restraint—that puts a menacing edge on her characterization...
...The game takes on a larger significance when the Nazis decide to score a propaganda triumph with it, while the POW's plan to use it to stage a mass escape . But once the two teams meet head-on in Paris, where the match has been moved to provide maximum exposure forwhatthe Germans are certain will be their victory, each side becomes determined simply to best the other on the playing field...
...Manhattan island has been converted into a maximum security penal colony patrolled by the United States Police Force...
...Jade rises dreamily from her father's lap and joins David...
...The script eventually covers barely half of the novel, yet Rascoe and Zeffi-relli waste footage on meaningless repetitions...
...Five minutes into the movie, the nature of thedisaster is apparent in a scene that was not adapted but invented by Rascoe...
...The novel begins with David's account?0 years after the fact—of how he set fire to the Butterfields' house when Hugh forbade his seeing Jade...
...The twinkle in his eye reminds us that it's all supposed to be taken in a spirit of fun, though, and it is...
...As usual, Roger Moore maintains a proper and veddy English sense of decorum, even when called upon to perform feats that one would expect to strain a man of his age, or at least put a wrinkle in his shirt...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 16
