Burl reviews Six Weeks! (1982)

Ha ha, Burl here to review a weepie from the early 1980s! As I’ve explained before, I have a certain fascination with the adult dramas and comedy-dramas of roughly the era 1978-82 – the time frame in which we saw the release of pictures like It’s My Turn, Only When I Laugh and The Last Married Couple in America! My working theory is that I’ve retained the perplexities I felt about adult behaviours and rituals at that formative time, and am looking to these movies for some key to solving them! Ha ha, who knows if it’ll ever really bear fruit, but in the meantime I’ll keep occasionally watching pictures in this genre, just in case!

The one I’m speaking of now is Six Weeks, which I’ve had sitting on my VHS shelf unwatched for a long time! It seemed like December would be the ideal month in which to make a viewing attempt, as it’s plain from the poster and video box that this is a holiday picture! In fact, as was the case with Cobra and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, it turned out to have only a small amount of holiday content, but that’s really the ideal for movies like this!

Now, ha ha, we can see that the picture stars Moores Dudley and Mary Tyler, but in this case, the Moore is not especially the merrier! Dudley is a tiny little California politician whose British accent must be explained in dialogue several times, and, to the extent he’s well-known at all, is well-known for using humour in his stump speeches! On the way to a fundraising party being given him, he meets a precocious pre-teen girl, Nicki, whom he casually invites to drop in to the shindig after she gives him directions on how to get there! The girl arrives with her mother in tow, and of course Mary Tyler plays the mother! She seems at first to have held on to the frosty-bitch persona she used in Ordinary People, but it turns out she’s just mad at Dudley because of a misunderstanding: she's revealed to be a cosmetic tycoon in the style of Estée Lauder, Mary Kay Ash or Elizabeth Arden! She apparently has Moore money than all three of them put together, and so she believes that Dudley has merely lured her daughter to the party so he can cadge a big donation!

The daughter develops an obsession with Dudley – not a romantic one (though it’s sometimes hard to tell), but one focused on helping his campaign! Dudley’s campaign manager, played by Joe “Lassiter” Regulbuto, is all for this, but Dudley doesn’t want to do any “babysitting,” and turns the full force of his elfin sarcasm on poor Mary Tyler! However, it turns out that Nicki, as cheery as she seems, is shortly to die of leukemia, so she’s soon helping out with the campaign, making phone calls and pasting bumper stickers onto brown Datsuns! Meanwhile she and the two Moores begin spending lots of time together, forming the de facto family that the girl never knew, and prompting carefully tamped-down r*mantic feelings between the adults!

Trouble is, Dudley already has his own family, and his wife Peg, played by Shannon Wilcox from Zapped Again, is pretty resentful that Dudley is spending Moore time with these other people than he is with her and their son! This leads to many strained discussions and a few awkward, unresolved scenes! Eventually Nicki and the two Moores end up in New York city at Christmastime, where Nicki gets to live her dream of dancing in The Nutcracker! But of course there must be the inevitable sad ending!

I have to say, this picture surprised me a bit! I’m not much a fan of three-hankie weepers, and this always looked to me like the most saccharine, most manipulative thing ever! I pictured endless scenes of the girl in her hospital bed, giving out brave and life-affirming advice to the teary-eyed Moores as she inches closer to death! In fact, after her triumphant turn on the stage, she gets on the subway, twirls around the pole for a minute, then looks stricken, utters her last words – not some fleecy bromide, but a heartrending “It hurts so much!” – and drops dead! Ha ha, it’s much Moore effective than the hospital scenario so many other movies would have chosen!

The adult relationships are Moore realistic than expected also, mainly by remaining completely unresolved! Moore’s wife is still suspicious and resentful and hurt, and while the relationship between the Moores remains unconsumated, it will clearly haunt the margins of their existence for the rest of their lives, Brief Encounter-style! So it’s still not exactly my kind of picture, but it was Moore so than I imagined! Ha ha, I give Six Weeks two Ghost Story posters, which we see plastered on a construction fence!

Burl reviews Summer of '42! (1971)

Ha ha, Burl here, still playing summer catch-up! (No, not Summer Catch, a movie I resent more every time I think about it! Ha ha, whatever score I gave that thing, it wasn’t low enough!) What I mean by that is I’ve got a summer movie to review for you, one that I watched in bits and pieces over the whole of this now-past summer! That’s not a way I usually watch movies, but in this case, for a picture that fits into the summerlong subgenre as neatly as this one does (ha ha, it’s even in the title!), it seemed not inappropriate! ("Summerlong" movies are ones that take place over an entire summer, in case you were wondering!)

The picture in question is Summer of ’42, a middlebrow drama from longer ago now than the period it was dramatizing was long ago from the movie’s release date, if you follow me! And I’ll give Summer of ’42 this accolade right off the hop: it absolutely nails the period details, at least as near as I can tell, since I wasn’t around back then! To ol’ Burl, it feels unquestionably authentic!

And here is another back-pat I’d like to hand the movie: This is without a doubt one of the great beach-town pictures I’ve seen, with more windswept dunes, scrub growth, crashing waves and half-buried fences than may be found in any number of other films in which such entities might reasonably be expected! Ha ha, why, it gives Jaws a run for its money in those departments, and that’s saying something!

With all that presented, I’ll get to the meat of the matter! Summer of ’42, as written by Herman Raucher, tells the clearly autobiographical story of Hermie, a New York lad vacationing in those wartime days on Nantucket Island! (They don’t call it Nantucket Island in the film, but that’s where the real story apparently happened, ha ha, though the movie was filmed in California, and looks it!) Hermie has a couple of pals, Oscy and Benji, and this diminutive-suffixed trio spend their days and evenings sweating in the grip of adolescent hormones, walking funny as a result, and along the way providing a pretty fair template for the Lemon Popsicle gang and their ilk! When push comes to shove, Benji can’t hack it and simply disappears; the important business of purchasing prophylactics and squiring girls to the movies (they go see Now, Voyager, I believe!), and thence to nighttime beach blankets, is left to Hermie and Oscy!

Oscy scores, but Hermie messes up, because his mind is fixed on the pretty young bride who lives in the fantastic beach house down the road! Ha ha, he acts like a real schmuck around her, and that’s no lie! She seems a bit like a Stepford Wife prototype given early retirement, but is friendly enough, and Hermie progresses from carrying her groceries to hauling boxes up a ladder to arriving one night when she’s just learned her husband, fighting in Europe, has fallen in battle; has become terribly d*unk; and is willing to self-hypnotize herself into deflowering Hermie! Ha ha, and Hermie never says a word after that, as far as we know, not even to his good pal Oscy! (He was saving it for the screenplay he would later write, I guess! Ha ha!)

Ha ha, I’ve liked a couple of Robert Mulligan pictures, like To Kill A Mockingbird and The Other, but despite a nice slowbones camera style, this one is a bit of a pettipoint! Of course it’s got a plinking-piano score from Michel Legrand; this was surely ordained! And let me tell you, they must have had the fog filters at level four for every shot in the picture! Robert Surtees, the cinematographer, was a pretty talented guy, but this measure of gauziness seems a bit much! Well, I guess it and all the rest of the syrup worked, ha ha, for it attracted audiences like flies! Oh, it was a mighty big hit!

But why? Several scenes, the condom-buying scene in particular, run on well past any reasonable length! It’s not that they’re boring or slow, but more a case of diminishing returns! Hermie travels beyond the realm of nervous juvenile here: he becomes a shaking, sweating, stammering wreck barely able to compose a sentence or stand upright, and a little of this goes a long way! I guess it’s interesting to see a yearning, lyrical account of behavior the older lady would be arrested and shamed for today, but really, the movie isn’t even as daring as it thought itself in 1971, I don’t think! And why the R rating? Ha ha, I sure can't figure it!

Jennifer “Scanners” O’Neill, who plays the lady, is as mentioned a bit robotic, but the kids are all good actors (though I think Benjie was really only playing himself!), as are the few adults in the picture, and I liked that we never saw Hermie’s parents, or anyone else’s parents for that matter! I wasn’t doing the movie much justice by watching it in chunks, I will admit, but nevertheless I can’t bring myself to award Summer of ’42 any more than one and a half strawberry cones with, uh, sprinkles!