garytheroux
Joined Feb 2000
Welcome to the new profile
We're still working on updating some profile features. To see the badges, ratings breakdowns, and polls for this profile, please go to the previous version.
Reviews12
garytheroux's rating
This film recently played on TCM and was billed as a comedy -- one of only two comedies it's director was involved with. Be aware of two things. One, that while easy to follow and reasonably well acted and edited, a good half-hour or more of this movie could be cut and no one would be the wiser. In fact, doing so would improve the production quite a bit. Second, this is NOT a comedy by any known definition. Most of it is a stark depiction of a family suffering under the thumb of the cold insensitivity of the leading male character. One really feels for that character's wife and children, who seem to accept his abuse as the price of living under his roof. This same plot line has turned up in many other movies -- including 1932's "Birthday Blues," one of the very best of the Our Gang shorts. So who actually is the most interesting player here? Surprisingly, it's the elderly former nanny -- played by a woman whose body language and facial expressions are spot-on in every scene. In the latter part of this movie, the "master" comes to realize the enormous value of his wife's contribution to their home - and how it is she who is the glue holding their household together. That was true in many marriages in 1925 and remains so today -- which makes the film's main point still relevant nearly a century later.
Easily one of the worst movies of all time, this badly shot and edited pretentious bore did attract moviegoers in the late '60s on the strength of the then novelty of seeing a few fleeting nude scenes -- which,m just like the rest of this endless waste of motion picture film, were ineptly staged, lit, miked and photographed. The movie starts with a parade of brief man-on-the-street interviews of no interest to anyone and quickly goes downhill from there. All I can assume is that production company must have thought it would be fun to compile to feature-length a lot of embarrassingly amateurish garbage and throw in a few utterly unerotic sex scenes in order to see how much of the public could thus be enticed to waste their time and money. The gimmick worked -- at first -- until those so fooled began to warn their friends that they'd have a far better time undergoing root canal.
Easily one of the funniest sitcoms in television history. Everything about this show worked -- from the superb, rapid-fire writing and lightning-fast editing to the absolutely flawless cast performances. Way, way, way ahead of it's time, every FRAME of every episode of "Car 54" dazzles and delights. You watch and are amazed that so many perfectly crafted and performed gags plus so much story and vivid characterizations were crammed into every 22 minute outing. It's hard to pick a favorite episode, but one of the best features non-actor game show host Jan Murray judging an all-cop barbershop harmony contest in which every quartet entered sings the same song: 1910's "By The Light of the Silv'ry Moon." Murray's resulting slow descent into insanity is unbelievably funny and marked the high water mark of his career. After the high-rated show won an Emmy in 1963, everyone connected to "Car 54" expected it to be picked up for a third season -- but that never happened. Why? Because the wife of NBC's head at the time loved "The Virginian" -- and insisted that her husband expand that western to 90 minutes. That meant something 30 minutes long had to be dropped from NBC's prime-time schedule. Unbelievably, they chose to axe "Car 54" -- the best show on NBC at that time. Series star Fred Gwynne moved on to "The Munsters" and brought along his best friend from the "Car 54" cast, Al Lewis. Joe E. Ross teamed with Imogene Coca to star on the short- lived series "It's About Time." Both of those shows, of course, were enormous steps down from the brilliant insanity of "Car 54." The cancellation broke the heart (and creative drive) of eight-time Emmy winning series creator and chief scriptwriter Nat Hiken. After "Car 54," Nat's only major project was "The Love God," a minor Don Knotts movie. Hiken died of a heart attack in 1968 at age 54. The only good thing about Nat's early passing was that he didn't have to wince like the rest of us did when his "Car 54" concept was ruined by the producers, writers and cast of the insultingly bad 1994 feature film version. Of the original TV cast, only minor players Al Lewis and Nipsey Russell turned up in the movie via cameos (even though other original cast members were still around). Lewis later said he knew the film version was crap but needed the money.