BEFORE: It's finally here, Valentine's Day, the highlight of February and the focal point of the romance chain, ideally. Have I picked the right film for the holiday? I wavered back and forth between so many possible chains, and each one put a different film on February 14 - for a long while it was "Private Life", then it was "The Bounty Hunter", then I re-worked everything again, and now we're here, with Bob Hoskins carrying over from "Paris, Je t'Aime" -
Over on Turner Classic Movies, Victor Jory links from "Papillon" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 15)
7:45 am "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964) with _____________ linking to:
10:20 am "Giant" (1956) with _____________ linking to:
1:45 pm "The V.I.P.s" (1963) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "The Third Man" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "Gaslight" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Key Largo" (1948) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "Written on the Wind" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 am "Ice Station Zebra" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
4:45 am "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)
I'm 50-50 tomorrow, 5 seen out of 10, but that's still a form of progress, because it brings my percentage up to 31.5%, 54 out of 171. Of course I've seen "Giant", "The V.I.P.s", "The Third Man", "Gaslight" and "Casablanca" - I somehow missed "Key Largo" over the years, though I'm sure TCM runs it all the time.
THE PLOT: An unconventional single mother relocates with her two daughters to a small Massachusetts town in 1963, where a number of events and relationships both challenge and strengthen their familial bonds.
AFTER: Well, I guess this is the best tie-in I could hope for, given the circumstances. Winona Ryder's character is a Jewish girl who wants to convert to Catholicism and become a nun, so she's always reading from a book on the Catholic saints. And who's the holiday named after? Saint Valentine! That's going to have to do. I mean, it's also a film about relationships and a teenage girl's first love, so there's a tie-in no matter what, but the Saint thing really drives it home and make me think I made a really good choice. Another win for the Accidental Scheduling Genius.
The story of the real Saint Valentine is rather sketchy, to say the least. There are at least three origin stories for him, or perhaps there were three people with that name whose stories got woven together somehow. Was he a priest of Rome or the Bishop of Terni, was he from Umbria or Interamna? Either way, he was arrested for evangelizing and brought before the emperor Claudius II, who commanded him to renounce his faith or be clubbed to death and beheaded. Supposedly before his execution he wrote a note to a judge's daughter, and thus inspired the custom of writing romantic notes, but of course this could all be a bunch of B.S. that never happened. Other stories have him getting in trouble for performing illegal Christian weddings in the Roman Empire.
Anyway, back to tonight's film, which is set back in 1963, a few months before the JFK assassination, which is a plot point midway through the film, though I'm not sure that it's a proper depiction to show people celebrating on Christmas and New Year's in late 1963, I mean, did anyone that year really feel in a holiday mood, so soon after their well-loved President was killed? Everyone here seems to get over it very quickly, that's all I'm saying, and we tend to think that all Americans were in a funk for several months and nobody cheered up until the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Now I don't know what to believe.
Anyway, this family (mother and two daughters) keeps moving around because the mother tends to gets involved in failing relationships, and her quick fix each time is to pack up her daughters and drive them to another state. After breaking up with her married employer, we watch this nomadic woman bring her tribe to settle in Massachusetts, in a home next to a convent. She's attracted to the local school bus driver, but so is her teen daughter, and she instead forms a relationship with a shoe salesman. Meanwhile her daughter goes fishing with the school-bus driver and makes out with him in the convent's bell tower - but she's either ignorant about sex or fearful of an immaculate conception (which is it? I guess the screenwriter couldn't just pick one?) so somehow she thinks she's pregnant after just kissing Joe.
Her solution is to get in the car and drive away, which would seem to be the answer to NONE of her problems, real or perceived. Yet another case where a film character acts in ways that don't make any sense, so therefore feel very unrealistic to me. I can understand being unwilling to talk to her mother about sex, but to just sit there, time and time again, and NOT SAY the things she needs to say that would just solve everything quite easily, that becomes very hard to swallow. Instead she ends up at some random family's house in Connecticut weaving some impossible tale about being from Brazil and owning a diamond mine? Give me a break. I also didn't quite understand how Lou, her mother's boyfriend, knew exactly where to find her. Even if the car was reported stolen, and the police tracked it down in New Haven, that still doesn't explain how he got there so quickly - so sorry, major NITPICK POINT here.
I don't know if I approve of the film's message, either, as displayed by Lou's relationship with Mrs. Flax - he claims that every relationship needs to be constantly growing and changing, or else it's dying. Not necessarily true, though this may represent his particular view of life, it's not that way for everyone. Some people settle in to a relationship and are very comfortable with it, and then what would be the point of disrupting that? Some people are married for 40 or 50 years, and while every relationship may have its ups and downs, that doesn't mean that they all have to be in a state of constant flux. This way of thinking leads some people to believe that they have to break up or get a divorce, just because things aren't always moving forward - which again, is not necessarily so. Some relationships have setbacks, and sometimes they have to move backwards to then go forwards further, do you know what I mean? Meanwhile Mrs. Flax believes something similar, that she's always got to be on the move, to the next town or the next job, while her daughters are just looking for a little stability in their lives, is that too much to hope for?
Overall it seems like divorce was such a stigma back in 1963 that people were always leaving each other when they felt the need, and then dealing with the legal ramifications later - so everybody was married to someone in name only, when the reality was that they'd physically checked out long ago. It must have been a very confusing time, with nearly everyone married to one person and sleeping with another, right? And how is that better than dealing with divorce? If it's over, it's over, and you might as well acknowledge that.
I don't know, I'm not really sold on this film, but it fit the criteria that I'm using now to select my films, which is that I've been curious about it. It's been in the cable listings for a long, long time, and now at least I can pass it by and ignore it, and I never have to watch it again.
There's an actor that appears here in the role of a town doctor, I won't say what kind of doctor because that would give away a plot point - but the actor is Rex Trailer, who was a TV star back in the Golden Age, he was a bit like Buffalo Bob Smith from the "Howdy Doody Show", only his show came first, and he worked with a puppet named Oky Doky - I swear, I'm not making this up. (Also, he had real cowboy + rodeo experience, I think Buffalo Bob was just an actor...) But at some point the show's production company went under, his puppeteer left to operate Howdy Doody, and Trailer moved to Philadelphia to host TV western shows there. In 1956 the Philadelphia TV station was bought by NBC, and he was offered a replacement gig in either Cleveland or Boston - he chose Boston, and hosted a weekend-morning Western show for kids, called "Boomtown", for several years. Even after that show ceased production, he stayed in Boston, did a lot of charity work and became a local celebrity. By the time I was a kid, he would appear on local affiliate stations to promote vacation trips to Knott's Berry Farm out west - I didn't even know what took place at Knott's Berry Farm, but man, Rex Trailer made we want to go there. He had that unique personality mix of Fred Rogers, Roy Rogers, and P.T. Barnum, if that makes any sense. In the later years he was inducted into both the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and the Massachusetts Country Music Hall of Fame - for all I know, he's the only member of that second one.
Also starring Cher (last seen in "Burlesque"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "Mr. Deeds"), Michael Schoeffling (last seen in "Vision Quest"), Christina Ricci (last heard in "The Smurfs 2"), Caroline McWilliams, Jan Miner, Betsy Townsend, Richard McElvain (last seen in "Joy"), Paula Plum, Dossy Peabody, Rex Trailer, Tom Kemp (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Jerry Quinn, with archive footage of Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters.
RATING: 4 out of 10 polished rocks
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Sal Mineo, Rod Taylor, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine.
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