Burl reviews It's My Turn! (1980)

It’s Burl’s tur-r-r-rnnn… to review a new picture for you, ha ha! It’s actually an older picture, made somewhere around 1980! I’ve lately been interested in middlebrow pictures from this period, the late 1970s into the early 80s, and I think I’ve finally figured out why! I was a kid at that time, and the adult world was mysterious to me; so maybe somewhere deep inside I believe I can solve all these long-forgotten mysteries by watching what the adults were up to, in films at least, as an adult myself!

It’s a pretty hair-brained theory any way you slice it, but it’s my excuse for watching pictures like It’s My Turn! I imagined this would be a boring, pastel hunk of Self-Actualizing Woman-slash-Woody Allen-lite: An Unmarried Woman meets Annie Hall, done without any taste, talent or verve! Well, I was right to a point – it does seem at times to be a very purposeful amalgam of those two movies, featuring as it does Jill Clayburgh acting like Diane Keaton; but beyond that it actually had some pleasant surprises in store for ol’ Burl! Ha ha!

Clayburgh stars as, if I’m recalling this correctly, Kate Gunzinger, a mathematics whiz who leaves her home in Chicago, and her boyfriend, Charles Grodin (who frequently ended up in roles like this, didn’t he, ha ha – Seems Like Old Times for Grodin once again!), to spend a weekend in New York! She’s there to take a job interview for an academic position in the Big Apple, and also to attend her father’s wedding to Beverly “Gunslinger” Garland! Ha ha, Gunslinger Marries Gunzinger! Turns out that Beverly’s son is Michael Douglas, an ex-ballplayer, and Clayburgh and Douglas spend the weekend getting to know one another better, ha ha, before they become step-siblings!

The movie is a series of quite long, dialogue-heavy scenes, which makes it seem like it was adapted from a stage play even though it wasn’t! It attempts, and surprisingly often succeeds, at a sort of flibbertigibbet honesty about matters of the heart, and on top of all this there’s a scene in a circa-1980 hotel games room, complete with foosball and tabletop computer baseball! Ha ha, it’s in moments like that you forget that there’s just about zero romantic chemistry between Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas!

It’s nice to see Beverly Garland in a different sort of a role than I’m used to, and there’s also an appearance by Daniel Stern, famed for his role in C.H.U.D., as another math whiz! But I think the Stern role should have been played by Keith “Christine” Gordon, ha ha – he would have been perfect! Even so, this was a surprisingly compelling little movie that rarely went exactly where you thought it would go, and ended in a fairly abstract and unresolved manner, which ol’ Burl always likes! Ha ha, “rerouting through Toronto” is used as a euphemism for something, but you can’t be quite sure what! I give It’s My Turn two and a half daddy-daughter haircuts!