| OCR Text |
Show LOCALS... SHOP EARLY Page Bl Thursday, October 15, 1981 1 WirM Iiv Hick Kroiijh teJa aftaauk V A mtmmmmm Jummmim Ni.i' 'Rich and Famous' confused and turgid A Classic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only Rich and Famous I don't like the so-called "women's pictures," but I think that even people who do will have trouble liking "Rich and Famous," a picture that is pretentious, campy, and luxuriantly soapy, all at once. Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Jac-queline Bisset play two college roommates. Bergen grows up to write trashy love novels that rack up millions at the book stores. Bisset writes serious, "intellectual" "intellec-tual" fiction. And the movie? It's like a producer took the worst books from each authoress and combined them for a film. When Mary Noel Blake (Bergen) sneaks out of her sorority house to the alter, she bubbles, "This time tomorrow, I'll be a married lady." Liz Hamilton (Bisset) responds uneasily, "This time tomorrow I'll be an unmarried lady." And there's your premise, folks. Two friends take opposite forks in the roads, and for years, they each gaze enviously at the. part the other has taken. Mary Noel raises a family in the Ma!ihu community. Liz becomes one of those intense authors who develops mental blocks and goes off into the Connecticut woods to grapple with them. The turning point comes when Mary Noel churns out a novel in her spare time. We hear the beginning and end of the story, as she reads it to Liz, and the plot the usual romantic oddyssey of a heroine and her string of men sounds like the rankest rank-est trash. But Liz is supposedly so struck by the naive feeling in the book that she (1) throws a jealous fit, and (2) recommends recom-mends it to her publisher in New York (Steven Hill). At this juncture, you wonder whether a movie can really be so bad and still take itself seriously. As the years whirl on, Mary Noel would appear to have it all a family, five or six best-sellers in a row, interviews on the Merv Griffin show, and even a Book Award nomination for her last effort. But wait! Success has brought tragedy. trag-edy. The family has drifted apart because of Mary Noel's success. Her husband (David Selby) and daughter (Meg Ryan) are both drifting drif-ting in their affections toward to-ward Liz. While Mary Noel resents sharing her loved ones with Liz, Liz resents Mary Noel for dogging her literary tracks. The jealous undercurrents presage a monumental fight. Bergen is humorously rustic and abrasive. Bisset is quietly patrician, deadly philosophical and serious. Will their sorority-house teddy ted-dy bear the symbol of their friendship survive the confrontation? con-frontation? Is this movie a drama? Is it a comedy? Is it two mints in one? The dramatic side of the film is Bisset's, as she. restlessly searches for fulfillment ful-fillment in various men and finds it. Some of her liaisons belong on a line-up, like the smiling teen-aged stud who grins his way up to her hotel room, and makes love to her. On a continental flight, she gets drunk with a fellow passenger (a sequence staged in rather comic fashion) and then retreats with him to the john, where they grab a quickie, mocked by the landing instructions from the stewardess. (While Bisset moans, the intercom says, "The sound you hear is that of the landing gear coming down.") This ridicule rid-icule of the romantic episode seems out of place in her story. It doesn't even fit with the funny tone of Bergen's appearances. It makes it hard for us to take Gerald Ayres's script seriously, and casts doubt on the sure-footed abilities of director George Cukor. (Cukor is a gentleman who has been placed by general opinion within the ranks of great directors. Thus far in my film education, I have not been able to understand why.) I wrote a few weeks ago about "Body Heat," where the entire cast needed to be weaned away from cigarettesthey cigaret-testhey were forever grabbing grab-bing them, puffing away grimly and romantically. In "Rich and Famous," there are similar fetishes. Bisset is forever guzzling booze to prepare herself for an argument or to fall into some man's arms. She is also prone to preciously erudite dialogue. She doesn't just whip out epigrams, she attaches authors to them. When she explains her fear of marriage to a younger man. she starts out, "It's like T.S. Eliot said about D.H. Lawrence ..." Just when it looks like she has found her true love a sensitive "Rolling Stone", writer cryptically played by Hart Bochner it crashes on the shoals of sensitivity. Their vibes are linked so intensely that any untoward ripples are enough to destroy the relationship. When he senses her fears about marriage, mar-riage, he storms out instead of confronting her feelings. "How many times did I propose to you," he asks in frustration later. (Actually, only once, and that was in his usual sexy-cryptic style.) Bergen, for her part, suffers a food fetish through the first half of the film, then switches to a yen for outrageous out-rageous clothes. Her husband hus-band is played by David Selby with the charm of a breadstick. And Bergen is exasperating until we can know for sure that she is intentionally being an outlandish out-landish character. She's a female George Hamilton. After years of getting bad notices for playing play-ing straight romantic roles, she has new acclain for spoofing or exaggerating the kind of character she played seriously. (Her first role of this type, "Starting Over" with Burt Reynolds, got her an Oscar nomination.) Bergen becomes a comic relief from Bisset's traumaseventually, trau-maseventually, from the whole movie. Asside from her, "Rich and Famous" has little that is real or flamboyantly fake. The movie is listlessly fraudulent, from a lawn teach-in of the '60s; to a posed oceanside conversation; conver-sation; to a fake TV profile of Mary Noel, with stilted narration by Dick Cavett. This is a movie that thinks when Bergen is shown in cozy domesticity, she has to look ten years older than Bisset. This is a film that means to explore the literary world (like a writer's "Turning "Tur-ning Point") but only scatters scat-ters in Ray Bradbury, Christopher Chris-topher Isherwood, and other authors to make the scene look authentic. Leave out Bergen, leave out the rapturous score by George Delerue, and you have a movie that leaves you wondering why you bother to go to movies. Order your holiday w reath mow... or buy the supplies to make your own. Rocky Mountain Christmas Gifts Open daily 1 1 - Salt Lake Chamber Ensemble to perform at the Egyptian Theatre m n KVi H I 1 Vl I H "-AW 13 i HOLIDAY VILLAGE MALL, PARK CITY, UT 649-6541 jj$2QQ Monday Night - All Ladies Tuesday - Economy Night 200 Starts Friday, Oct. 16th. 1981 A story of two frieada (aH- who didnt know they were supposed to be enemies. m Si I A i Sat. Sun. :30, 4:30 Mon. - Frl. :00, 9:00 7:00, 9:00 R FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ANIMAL HOUSE... A DIFFERENT KIND OF ANIMAL AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON THE MONSTER MOVIE f Sat. Sun. 2:00, 3:45, 5:30 7:20, 9:10 Mon. Fri. 7:20, 9:10 1 b PGl s - - ' - -. i it, " 1 m 'ft. 1 fc i h-W m WAV Wmi,ji V ft it A w ,.:;. :: ,, ill , , m , s & . - I I . - ; ' - - - - ' u . v. 1 n. '' ';. :;!;n 'I ' - -I' ' ' ' ; . : ft , . I I "'7 U m PIp ' ' No one comes close to James Bond 007. ROGER MOORE Mon fh X7fT 7fJ m 7 00 9 15 !E- r Mi ItJlJIX Sat. -Sun. i!:ib, 4:35 i S It EYES ONLY COUPON ! til lit fi i fci-t iA h fi iiki jM" - Buy one Sandwich or 2 Hot-Dogs and get a sof tdrink free at the Electronic Doghouse located right next to the Theatre. We feature Hot-Dogs, Sandwiches and the most popular Videogames. Offer expires Oc t. 20th, 1981. Cathy Hansen formerly of the Gazebo temporarily located at The Cutting Company Trolly Square Salt Lake City 363-7142 Home 942-4390 ' Salt Lake Chamber Ensemble un Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m., KPCW and the Park City Library will present the Salt Lake Chamber Ensemble Ensem-ble in a concert of baroque music at the Egyptian Theatre. The-atre. A champagne reception in the lobby will follow. The Utah Rural Arts Consortium and the Utah Arts Council, supported in part by the National Endowment Endow-ment for the Humanities, make this program afford-, able to small Utah communities. com-munities. The Salt Lake Chamber Ensemble combines the talents tal-ents of four Utah musicians: Eric Graf on flute; John Thompson playing viola; Patrick Zwick on viola de Gamba; and Ricklen Nobis on harpsicord. Nobis is a frequent soloist with the Utah Symphony, Ballet West, and other Salt Lake Chamber ensembles. Special guest artist will be Jeffrey Wagner, a member of the Utah Symphony, playing viola. Tickets are $5, including the reception, and are available avail-able at the Park City Library and Dolly's Bookstore on Main Street. Any profit from the concert will be used to build the classical record collections of KPCW and the new Park City Library. For Jflore information, call the library at 649-8118 or KPCW at 649-9004. Watch for my new salon Opening soon in Park City i T e i i i E B |
