BEFORE: Well, when I was putting together this romance chain I went as far as I could with the films that I had, and that got me to "Thanks for Sharing", which had been on my list for, I don't know, let's say six months. Then I had another chain that I wanted to end with, because it would end with several films with Diane Lane, most of which had been on my list for even longer. That chain was about 11 or 12 films long, and started with a Meg Ryan film. So, with a gap between a Tim Robbins film and a Meg Ryan film, I remembered this film, starring both of them, and added it as a maybe. I looked for it on premium cable for a few months, and it didn't show up, but hey, there's always iTunes. And now since I didn't come up with some alternate linking plan, I've got to bite the bullet and shell out a few bucks to rent this one from iTunes if I want to finish the romance chain the way I planned. I can't help but think there must have been a better way to arrange the films that I had, that I should have paid more attention to the uncredited cameos from actors like Colleen Camp or Michael Badalucco, that there had to be another way to get from A to B without going through THIS film, which seems like it has a very dumb premise. But I didn't find it in time, so I've got no other way out - live by the linking, die by the linking.
Just one week left in TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and tomorrow, February 25, they've circled back to "Romantic Comedies", just like I have, followed by the primetime face-off for "Favorite Gangster" and the late-night competition for "1941 Best Screenplay: Original vs. Adapted":
4:00 am "Holiday" (1938)
6:00 am "The Awful Truth" (1937)
8:00 am "Designing Woman" (1957)
10:00 am "It Happened One Night" (1934)
12:00 pm "Libeled Lady" (1936)
2:00 pm "The Tender Trap" (1955)
4:00 pm "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)
6:00 pm "Woman of the Year" (1942)
8:00 pm "The Public Enemy" (1931)
9:45 pm "Little Caesar" (1930)
11:15 pm "Citizen Kane" (1941)
1:30 am "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941)
Thanks to my past marathons featuring Cary Grant, Debbie Reynolds and Katharine Hepburn, and because I've devoted so much time each February to romance films, I think I'm racking up eight tomorrow - "Holiday", "The Awful Truth", "It Happened One Night", "The Tender Trap", "The Goodbye Girl", "Woman of the Year", and of course, "The Public Enemy" and "Citizen Kane". 8 out of 12 is a good score for any day, and that brings me up to 117 seen out of 284, or 41.2% with just 6 days to go.
THE PLOT: A mechanic romances the mathematician niece of physicist Albert Einstein, with help from Einstein and his friends.
AFTER: OK, so maybe I didn't hate this one as much as I thought I would. But it's still an unforgivable movie screenwriting sin to muck up the details of Albert Einstein's life to make it fit your rom-com screenplay. Yes, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1933, and he did live in New Jersey until 1955, had an affiliation with various institutes located in Princeton. But he never had an American niece, and though he was friends with Kurt Gödel, another character in this film, they were not old at the same time, Gödel was 27 years younger than Einstein. Someone did the least amount of research on Einstein required to shoe-horn him into this story, and got many basic details wrong. Einstein's character here even claims to have always been "terrible at math", but nothing could be further from the truth - he taught HIMSELF algebra and geometry at the age of 12, and mastered calculus at 14.
And still, at the end of this film, they posted this disclaimer that the people and events in this film are fictitious, and "any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional". Really? So you dressed up Walter Matthau to look like some OTHER brilliant physicist named Albert Einstein, not the famous one? Give me a break. This is just some legalese to cover the movie studio's ass, but I bet if Einstein's descendants sued them, their defense wouldn't hold up in court. Similarity to the real Einstein was clearly intentional. And yes, I also hate it when a cable show claims to be "New" or even "All-new" and then turns out to be a clip show full of footage from previous episodes or the same old episode with pop-up trivia balloons added or something. How can that be "ALL new"?
I'm hard-pressed to even justify the premise here - was the idea supposed to be that since Einstein was smart with regards to physics, then he'd logically also be an expert on love? Or since he was famous for his theories and thought experiments, therefore logically he'd be into conducting romantic experiments on his own family members? I'm not following the train of thought here. He didn't even really have to be Einstein, the story would have worked if he were just some random college professor who didn't like his niece's arrogant British boyfriend, and wanted to see if he could get her to fall for the American mechanic who really cared for her instead.
Because I watched that whole "Genius" miniseries last year on NatGeo about Einstein, and as smart as that guy was about math and the speed of light and the effects of gravity, he wasn't exactly a genius when it came to relationships. He married a Serbian woman named Mileva who was also very smart when it came to math, and they had 2 sons, Hans Albert and Eduoard. But then Albert was attracted to his first (and second) cousin, Elsa, and drifted apart from Mileva. He married Elsa in 1919, and they emigrated to the U.S. together in 1933, but she died in 1936. And there were plenty of affairs along the way, so in no way would I regard Einstein as anything close to an expert on affairs of the heart.
Still, there's something slightly charming in seeing Einstein and three other senior citizen scientists get involved in the love lifes of the younger folk, bonding with the auto mechanic who's going to turn Albert's car into a souped-up convertible, eating ice cream together and talking about science-fiction stories and real-world physics as if some common ground could be found there. And they pull pranks on the niece's suitor that they don't like, such as letting all his lab animals out of their cages, ha ha, destroying two years' worth of scientific study. And then they help perpetuate the lie that this auto mechanic is some kind of genius / idiot savant, totally helping him to cheat on his I.Q. test, because what great relationship doesn't get founded on a comic misunderstanding?
But then when you look at the big picture, it's like Einstein helped his niece find love, but only at the cost of his own integrity, and that's pretty sad. Maybe the fact that this premise and plot never happened, and is a big pile of fictional B.S. is the best news after all.
Also starring Meg Ryan (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Walter Matthau (last seen in "Grumpier Old Men"), Stephen Fry (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Lou Jacobi (last seen in "Irma la Douce"), Gene Saks (last seen in "Nobody's Fool"), Joseph Maher (last seen in "The Out-of-Towners" (1999)), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Frank Whaley (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Charles Durning (last seen in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), Keene Curtis, Alice Playten, with cameos from Greg Germann (last seen in "Get Hard"), Daniel von Bargen (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Alice Drummond (also last seen in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas").
RATING: 4 out of 10 anachronisms
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