The First Wives Club

This movie is one of my guilty pleasures. It's uneven and really, considering the sheer quantity of talent involved, it's a bit of a letdown. Based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith, it's about three college friends (Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, Bette Midler) who reunite years later after they've been dumped by their husbands for younger women. Their plan for revenge soon evolves into one where they can channel their frustrations for good. The movie is some kind of rah rah feminist picture, and yet it has moments where it completely contradicts itself. The women spend a lot of time praising their own abilities to beat their lousy ex-husbands into submission, but at the end, when one of the grumpy husbands utters, "you can't do anything to us," they acquiesce that no, they cannot, but the people they have under their control (all men) have the ability to get results. It's a strange moment of inconsistency. The movie itself is a bit formulaic, complete with the montage toward the end where the three leads, frustrated with how things are going, spend the duration of a mushy 90's pop ballad walking with their heads down, consoling themselves with family, and having a good cry. The movie wants to be brassy and gushy in the middle, but I'm not convinced it can have it both ways.
Director Hugh Wilson doesn't always stage scenes the way he should. There's a scene where they sneak into Midler's ex's apartment, and it's built up like something out of a bad spy thriller, with the three comedians screaming and pushing and shoving and freaking out in histrionic fashion. The scene is big but it feels big in a contrived way--factory made comedy with a director's attempt to manage the audiences' reaction.
The talent rescues the movie from its shortcomings. The three leads are too much fun to watch to completely dismiss The First Wives Club, and the supporting cast is to die for: Maggie Smith, Eileen Heckart, Sarah Jessica Parker, Stockard Channing, Dan Hedaya, Victor Garber, Stephen Collins, Marcia Gay Harden, Bronson Pinchot, Elizabeth Berkley. 1996

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Diane Keaton and Woody Allen traipsing through Manhattan trying to figure out if their elderly neighbor (Jerry Adler) murdered his wife. An enjoyable movie (Allen's 2006 comic-mystery Scoop is kind of a companion to it) that coasts on the charisma of its stars. Keaton's character drives the investigation--she's bored with her life and the prospect of a genuine murder mystery is just too tantalizing to ignore, dragging her neurotic, whiny, reticent husband (Allen) along. The banter between them is wonderfully witty, a lovely little tribute to the films they made in the 1970s like Annie Hall. I think this one is totally underrated. It's not as "important" as some of Allen's earlier films, but it's got a wonderfully vervy charm to it that keeps the viewer engaged in the comic suspense. With Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston, Joy Behar.

Touch of Evil

This week I showed two Orson Welles classics to my students: Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958). I learned more than I ever dreamed I would about Welles and his career. He caused a sensation in the New York theater world when he produced Macbeth but set it in Haiti, and of course when he broadcast a radio version of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and scared the bejesus out of America.

Welles was brought to Hollywood soon after, even though he'd never made a motion picture before, and the legendary Citizen Kane was born. Kane is a thinly veiled biography of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and a film that was nearly doomed to a life on the cutting room floor because Hearst did not want it to see the light of day. The American Film Institute voted it the number one American picture of all time. It's certainly innovative. The cinematography is unlike most of the movies you'll see before 1941. However, after watching both Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil virtually back to back, I must say I like Touch of Evil better. It's a nightmarish looking film noir set in a sleazy border town, with Charlton Heston playing a Mexican narcotics cop (!) who gets in the crossfires of a corrupt Texas police chief (played by Welles).

The movie is outlandish and offbeat: it pulsates with a wonderfully lucid rhythm that makes it still fresh despite its age and some of the corny dialogue. Janet Leigh co-stars as Heston's wife, who spends a terrifying night in a rural motel that foreshadows her experience in Psycho two years later. The film boasts one of the most famous opening shots in movie history. Cinematographer Russell Metty used an incredibly long tracking shot to show us a stick of dynamite being placed into the trunk of a convertible, then letting us watch as the car's owner gets in, drives off, and eventually is killed in the impending explosion. That suspenseful, almost voyeuristic feel never leaves the movie, and you spend the rest of Touch of Evil as a complicit audience member rather than a passive one.

Henry Mancini's Latin-enthused score drifts through the picture giving you the feel that you're wandering through a busy city--lit up with neon--at midnight. Smoky bars with moody music seeping out into the twilight. The seedy underbelly of the film noir world at its darkest most irresistibly enthralling (and the genre was on its way out by 1958). Alas, Touch of Evil was taken away from Welles and dramatically re-edited, then released as a B-grade thriller. It made very little money, but after being restructured to fit Welles's original vision, it has become something of a classic, one that is more exciting, more twisted, and more unhinged than the magnificent Citizen Kane.