The Four Seasons

Alan Alda the actor has come up with a few worthwhile projects over the years as a writer and director. This movie, his feature directorial debut, is quite enjoyable.

Three upper-middle class couples are seen during the four vacations they take annually. They enjoy each others' company, but a fissure in the friendships begins to grows when one man tires of life with his wife and introduces his new, younger girlfriend into the group, and things go from there. Alda manages very successfully the balance between comedy and drama, aided by the excellent cast of veterans. All the principals here (the first seven listed in the credits) do fine work.

Three couples--best friends--are seen on four trips together during the course of a year. Writer-director-star Alan Alda shows a surprisingly stylish eye for the beauty of the changing seasons, and as a writer he knows how to shake off the melodramatic doldrums and be funny, but his sense of style and pacing isn't helped by his need to be educational, to teach us all something about ourselves (this movie hints that maybe he's been in therapy too long). The film isn't whiny, but it has shapeless scenes that are overdrawn--and the longer they go, the more rambling they become. One couple separates and the man brings a new woman into the fold, but his ex-wife (the wonderful Sandy Dennis) is much more interesting and sympathetic than who we're left with. Two college-age daughters are introduced (played by Alda's real-life children), but they don't seem to be familiar with anyone at the table. The final act allows Alda's repressed character to finally react and blow off some steam, yet the responses he elicits (particularly from his wife, Carol Burnett) aren't believable--the characters all sound and act too much like each other for there to be nuances in their reactions. Burnett is tough to get a grip on here, and I don't know if it's the writing or just the tack she's taken here as an actress, but her rigid/passive/supporting-but-unhappy wifey doesn't showcase any particular feeling; Bess Armstrong, as the new friend, doesn't get a good strong scene until almost the end, and that's because Alda enjoys poking fun at her youthful idealism (even at the end, Armstrong is stuck with dippy dialogue like, "I'm going to take a run in the snow!"). The picture was a big hit, and it may spark conversations about friendships and our need to be around what is familiar--even if it nags at us--but Alda doesn't allow for solutions. He wants to create a mess, analyze the mess, and then throw up his hands and say "that's the way life is!" But this reality of his is plastic-coated, with TV-ready dialogue, and while he's an amiable filmmaker, he's never a self-satisfied one. **1/2 from ****

Ever since I watched her as a kid on The Electric Company and The Rockford Files, I have always loved Rita Moreno. She is one of the best actresses EVER! and most people don't even realize this. She is the only entertainer in history to have won the highest award in all four mediums of entertainment. She has won an Oscar for her movie work, an Emmy for her tv work, a Tony for her stage work and a Grammy for her singing. She is in the Guiness Book of World Records as a matter of fact. People do not realize that Alan Alda wrote many of the episodes of MASH (as they also don't realize Michael Landon wrote many episodes of Little House). He is both a great comic and a great comic writer who is wonderful and witty with words. He also directed this film and did an outstanding job. It is a beautiful film to look at with the lovely scenery and the change of seasons, symbolic of the conflicts the three couples are going through. Alda created six wonderful characters that you really care about and feel bad for and perhaps you see a little bit of yourself in them. Alda's character thinks that he is so in control, Jack Weston's character is a hammy, blustering hypochondriac (Alda says at one point that he is "the Muhammad Ali of mental illness"). Bess Armstrong was just getting her start in films at the time and she is really wonderful as Len Carou's ditzy girlfriend. Sandy Dennis's career had gotten off to an amazing start when she was in "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf" but it never really took off the way it should have and she died so young of cancer. She gives a wonderful performance in this film. It is rather low key, but you feel this woman's pain as her husband leaves her for this bimbo. You really feel angry for her. Carol Burnett is a wonderful comic, but a fine actress as well (she was great in Annie), she gives a really sensitive performance especially in the scene where she tells Alda to s*&t or get off the pot! How touching Carol! Seriously Rita Moreno is my favorite in this film. I love Claudia, she is kind and sweet and affectionate and so very very ITALIAN! Rita Moreno should have gotten an Oscar for her performance. She even has a brief nude scene in the film. I don't mean to sound sexist but she looked fantastic! God bless you Rita!

I was 14 the first time I saw this film in 1981 on HBO. I found it to be a totally engrossing movie that made one actually think about the complexities of life and relationships other than just your typical movie fare of sex and violence. They just don't make movies like this one anymore, and probably never will again (which is sad).

Like Vivaldi's Four Seasons, the cast of characters cover a range of emotions; through anger, grief, and denial of the departure of the spouse of one of the couples who vacation quarterly together and finally acceptance when a new and (younger) addition enters the picture.

The banter between the couples is unusually intelligent, and hysterically funny in some scenes. Jack Weston's character Danny is my favorite. Alda's Jack describes him in one scene as being hypochondriachal, which is the understatement of the year. He seems to feel that he is dying at any given moment of any number of diseases. Death to him is imminent, and his portrayal of this emotion is brilliantly funny because of the sincerity with which he tries to convince the others of the validity of his fears. I loved the scene where he and his wife Claudia have an arguement and she offers up the suggestion once too often that her Italian heritage is the reason for her behavior and Danny cuts loose on her. He gets so into it, that it doesn't seem to matter to the director that he flubbed the line where he's screaming out the window that "I'm sick of your I'm your Italian", when he really meant to say "I'm sick of your I'm Italian". So the scene is left in.

The scene where Jack and Kate laugh their a**e* off on the boat one night while listening to Nick and Ginny having sex is also hysterical.

Really great movie. Highly recommended for people as desperate as I am for some intelligent and thought provoking entertainment.

THE FOUR SEASONS (1981) *** Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Rita Moreno, Jack Weston, Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Bess Armstrong. Alda, who wrote and directed, assembles a veteran cast of colorful couples spending their quarterly vacations together during one memorable year of change and confrontations of middle age craziness with deft and frequently funny aplomb. The choice to use Vivaldi's `Four Seasons' and the beautiful scenery only underscores the theme perfectly. Trivial note: the college-aged girls the group visit for parents' day are actually Alda's real-life daughters.