Worth Winning

The concept of Worth Winning is like something out of an incorrigibly caddish 1960s movie, in which grown men expound on the Playboy philosophy and toy with women like chess pieces. Boeing Boeing and Guide to the Married Man come to mind.

The idea here is that a successful ladies’ man (Mark Harmon) is proposed a wager by three buddies. They say Harmon can’t persuade three women to accept his proposals of marriage; he says he can, and he can even produce videotaped proof. The women, however, will be chosen by the buddies, who intend to make the bet as difficult as possible to fulfill.

The women are: a blond bombshell (Maria Holvoe), who’s constantly surrounded by beefy pro football players; a married woman (Lesley Ann Warren) with a large appetite for sex; and a concert pianist (Madeleine Stowe) who already hates Harmon and everything he stands for. No problem for our hero, who quickly works his magic.

Of course, these are not the 60s, and in enlightened times such as ours, Harmon must have his consciousness raised. And, despite its apparently sexist premise, Worth Winning (which was written by two female writers) gives the boot to romantic gamesmanship, and casts a vote in favor of the “C” word – commitment.

The movie has some amusing sequences, especially the scenes involving Madeleine Stowe, who brings a lightness to her role (she played the lady in distress in Stakeout). Director Will Mackenzie, a veteran of television, does a respectable job of guiding things, although the decision to have Harmon speak directly to the camera at various moments (after sleeping with a conquest, he tells us, “I’ve had better times pulling out splinters”) was probably ill-advised.

The big problem with Worth Winning is Mark Harmon. To put it mildly, Cary Grant he ain’t. Harmon, a likable enough screen presence, consistently tries to act funny, which is one of the worst things you can do in this sort of comedy. Playing it straight would have yielded much better results. As it is, he’s a hole in the center of the movie, hardly worth anything.

First published in The Herald, November 3, 1989

Will Mackenzie acted on TV and then became a director, steadily working in sitcomland for decades. As far as I can tell this is his only big-screen feature as director. The screenwriting team of Josann McGibbon and Sara Pariott is still going; they also did Runaway Bride. This came during the big Mark Harmon moment, and I suppose it helped wind that down. It was the final screen credit for Maria Holvoe, who was also in Willow.

The Wizard

The Wizard is a patched together little movie that starts off as a kind of poor relation to Rain Man but then begins to resemble an extended commercial for Nintendo video games.

Is the whole world in on Nintendo? Children, teenagers, and parents evidently are, although there are still some of us who remain uninitiated. The makers of The Wizard assume that audiences are fully appreciative of Nintendo’s dominant place in the universe.

In any case, the movie is about a traumatized little boy who regularly runs away from home. He’s mute and unresponsive, and his mother and mean stepfather are considering putting him in a home.

This raises the ire of the boy’s half-brother (Fred Savage, from TV’s The Wonder Years), who takes off down the highway with his little brother in tow. In a bus station, they run into a saucy redheaded number who’s just about Savage’s age – though, being a girl, she’s more mature. Savage’s father (Beau Bridges) and other brother (Christian Slater) give chase, as does a creepy private investigator.

The road business, and the discovery of the mute boy’s secret gift, give all of this the flavor of a pint-sized Rain Man. In Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman was found to be an autistic savant, able to apply his peculiar skills to the gambling halls of Las Vegas. In The Wizard, the young savant is a terror at video games, specifically Nintendo.

As fate would have it, there is a Nintendo grand championship about to get under way in Los Angeles, in a building at Universal Studios (Universal also happens to be the producer of The Wizard). So after a brief studio tour, the whole thing comes together at his big Nintendo-off, with results you really ought to be able to guess.

I’m guessing that simply staying at home and noodling at your own Nintendo would be more exciting than seeing The Wizard.

First published in The Herald, December 1989

It has a cult following, you say? Yes, I suppose it would. Director Todd Holland went from this to directing a couple of Twin Peaks episodes, so there. And if you’re wondering, I still haven’t played Nintendo, to my knowledge, but I am grateful to them for rescuing the Seattle Mariners.

When Harry Met Sally …

When Harry meets Sally, they are college students thrown together while sharing a ride from Chicago to New York. Both are moving to the Big Apple, but Harry is skeptical about being friends. He insists that men and woman cannot maintain platonic friendships. Inevitably, he says, “the sex parts” get in the way. Why bother?

Nevertheless, as we see in Rob Reiner’s new film, When Harry Met Sally…, a platonic friendship is possible between these two. At least, it’s possible until the sex parts get in the way. Maybe Harry was right after all.

Reiner’s story, which he developed with writer Nora Ephron, carries these characters over more than 10 years, during which they lose track of each other, find significant relationships with others (which ultimately fail), and settle into a comfortable best-friend groove. They call each other from bed when Casablanca comes on late-night television, and debate whether Ingrid Bergman should’ve stayed with Humphrey Bogart, but that’s the closest they come to sharing a bed until an impromptu hugging session turns serious.

This is a funny movie with a big laugh every three or four minutes, but it doesn’t go quite as deep as Reiner clearly intends. And Reiner has difficulty escaping the long shadow cast by Woody Allen’s movies, especially Annie Hall. Reiner’s vision of Manhattan is quite loving – two friends discussing important stuff at a hot dog stand on the corner, lovers walking through Central Park – but we’ve seen these things before, and better, in Allen’s films.

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan play Harry and Sally; their good friends, who naturally find happiness with each other long before Harry and Sally do, are played by Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher. Ryan is still maturing as an actress, but she has a couple of confidently managed showstoppers, including a scene in a crowded deli in which she demonstrates the technique of faking an orgasm. (The house is almost guaranteed to be brought down each time this scene plays.)

Crystal, better known as a comedian than an actor, seems a curious, superficial choice at first, but he eventually settles in. With his unerring sense of where to aim a one-liner, he’s obviously what Reiner wants in the role.

When Harry Met Sally … is above all a vehicle for Rob Reiner’s blend of sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and Borscht-belt comic instincts (the latter honed, no doubt, at the knee of his father Carl who wrote for Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar and created “The Dick Van Dyke Show”). After he capably directed other peoples’ stories in Stand by Me and The Sure Thing, you have the feeling Reiner is telling his own story this time. It’s a nice one.

First published in The Herald, July 13, 1989

For a movie that seems to have taken a secure place as a modern comedy classic (“modern” even though over 30 years old now), it’s a little surprising that it got only one Oscar nomination, for Ephron’s screenplay. It’s a well-jiggered piece, with many funny moments, but I will say that its central premise, that a man and woman cannot be friends, seems very un-modern, and more suited to a 1950s Doris Day picture – but then I find a lot of Ephron’s attitude and humor to be retrograde, despite her comic gifts.

Welcome Home

Welcome Home is a film so without irony, so without hipness, that it could be mistaken for a soap opera from the 1950s. Except for its subject matter, that is, which tells of a soldier in Vietnam who was lost behind lines in 1971 and presumed dead.

The soldier (Kris Kristofferson) emerges in Thailand 17 years later. He has spent his time in prison camps and later in hiding in Cambodia, where he married and had two children. The sore point: He also has a wife back in Vermont, who thinks he has been dead all these years.

The movie’s main matter is bringing Kristofferson back to the United States and letting the dramatic chips fall where they may when he reappears. His father (Brian Keith) gets over the shock readily and happily, but the wife (JoBeth Williams) is, understandably, shakier. She’s remarried (to Sam Waterston), for one thing; then there’s a son, now 17, whom Kristofferson knows nothing about.

The revelation of the son is entirely predictable, and a lot of the hubbub surrounding the wife-with-two-husbands business seems hyped up. The film also lays on a side plot about a military coverup of Kristofferson’s re-emergence that seems to exist purely to have something else going on.

With all of that, Welcome Home should be a bad movie. It may very well be a bad movie. I must say that I found it so completely unaware of its own implausibilities, so unashamed of its melodrama, that it was effective, even moving, on its own terms. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Williams and Waterston are capable as always, Brian Keith is better than he’s been in years, and Kristofferson – well, he’s nobody’s idea of a master thespian, but if you want to communicate the immediate sense of a scorched soul, he’s the man. The script, by Maggie Kleinman, often skirts around the sizable clumsiness of some scenes with economical, stripped-down dialogue.

Welcome Home is the last film from Franklin J. Schaffner, a generally solid craftsman who enjoyed a brief time in the upper echelon of American directors (he won the Best Director Oscar for Patton). Schaffner, who died earlier this year, won’t be remembered as one of the greats, but he made some entertaining movies and he always showed a strong sympathy for the outsider. As a sendoff, Welcome Home is nothing to be ashamed of.

First published in The Herald, September 1989

For Schaffner, better to go out with this than Yes, Giorgio or Sphinx, I suppose. It was also Trey Wilson’s last film. I remember nothing about the movie, sorry. Henry Mancini did the music.

Wild Orchid

I’m not sure exactly when Mickey Rourke stopped being one of the most promising actors of his generation, but it must have been around the time of 9 ½ Weeks, an erotic epic so lifeless it gave soft-core porn a bad name.

Rourke has done some good work when called upon – his performance in Barfly was brilliant – but he seems drawn to navel-contemplating and marginalia.

Wild Orchid couldn’t come at a worse time in his career, for it reunites him with 9 ½ Weeks creators Zalman King and Patricia Louisianna Knop. It is yet another dreadful exercise in would-be erotica, with Rourke doing his cryptic laid-back routine amid a crawling narrative about sexual abandon.

Model Carre Otis plays a naïve Midwestern girl who gets hired by a flaky businesswoman (Jacqueline Bisset, poor thing) who whisks her off to Rio for some high-pressure dealmaking. It’s carnival time, of course, so everyone is sexed to the teeth. Otis meets an incredibly wealthy guy who rides a motorcycle, wears a leather jacket without a shirt, and can’t stand being touched (Rourke, as if you didn’t know).

As anything but a travelogue, Wild Orchid is awful. The dialogue wavers between deadpan non sequiturs (“I’m not used to men in masks biting my neck”) to sensitivity-training observations that cut about as deep as greeting cards, such as the difference between “having sex” and “making love.” This stuff would embarrass Erich Segal and that Jonathan Livingston Seagull guy.

The sex scenes generate a lot of smoke, little fire. In a way, it’s too bad, because the American cinema has precious little in the way of serious excursions into erotica. Phil Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the only recent film that comes immediately to mind. No one seems interested in topping Last Tango in Paris.

The feverish wrestling in Wild Orchid was naughty enough to earn the film an X rating upon its initial submission to the MPAA ratings board (some post-X cutting and pasting got the film an R). There have also been rumors about the alleged authenticity of the climactic love scene between Otis and Rourke, who apparently became an off-screen item during shooting. In other words: Are they really doing it?

All of which sounds suspiciously like an attempt to generate interest in this excruciatingly boring movie.

First published in The Herald, April 1990

Despite the U.S. release date, the film showed in Europe in ’89, so it counts for our website purposes. Otis and Rourke married, and she did very little in film after that. The film was, of course, part of the Zalman King brand. Would love to hear the on-set conversations between actor and star, in this case.

We’re No Angels

Watching Robert De Niro in We’re No Angels is a little like watching Meryl Streep in She-Devil. We know these actors as the most volcanically serious performers of their generation. There’s something positively liberating about seeing them play fast and loose in out-and-out comedy.

De Niro is teamed with that chip off the De Niro block, Sean Penn, in a movie very loosely adapted from a 1955 Humphrey Bogart film of the same title. This one is about two convicts, played by De Niro and Penn, who get dragged along when a fellow inmate (James Russo) busts out of prison on his way to the electric chair.

Russo goes his own way, but De Niro and Penn straggle along through the wilderness (filmed in British Columbia) until they reach a small river town. All they have to do is cross the bridge in town and they’ll be safely in Canada. But with the prison warden hanging around the bridge with his Dobermans, our boys need to be wary.

Somehow it follows that De Niro and Penn are mistaken for priests, visiting the town for an annual celebration of the local miracle, which involves a weeping statue. Much of the film’s comedy, therefore, comes out of the sight of these two roughnecks wobbling around in clerical garb.

The fact that these two actors are known for their non-comedic tendencies simply adds to the joke. Penn summons up all the sweetness he can muster – which, surprisingly enough, is quite a bit – as the lame-brained con who finds himself at home in the church. De Niro is given to mugging, but he’s so good at communicating exasperation that it doesn’t matter. He’s particularly adept at absolving an adulterer in the confessional: “Your wife doesn’t know? Then what are you worried about? Forget about it!”

Add a little romance for De Niro with a local (Demi Moore), and We’re No Angels comes together as satisfactory entertainment. It has a nice edge to it, thanks to the script by playwright David Mamet, which consistently spews sharp and gritty dialogue. There’s a certain morbidity that keeps the movie interesting, provided by Mamet and Irish-born director Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa).

First published in The Herald, December 15, 1989

Another review where it appears a final paragraph or two was chopped off. And yet, I’d probably said enough at that point. The supporting cast is full of characters actors, including an early appearance by John C. Reilly. Apparently De Niro and Jordan did not get along, which could explain something. The poster, as you can see, used the tagline “The Con is On,” one of a series of films that employed that dismal phrase – the first being, in my memory, and I am sorry I remember it, The Sting II.