Golan/Globus, the guys behind The Cannon Group, generally put their considerable energies into action crap for the more undiscriminating parts of the International Marketplace. But when they did try to class up their product with ‘quality’ merchandise, more often than not, their High Brow offerings were even worse than their usual trash. Like a diner cook taking over the evening shift at a 2-Star Michelin-rated restaurant.* And so it proves on this Sam Shepard adaptation of one of his most popular plays. Yet assessing fault a bit tricky since the play itself feels all used up in theme & execution. Robert Altman, during his desert years between NASHVILLE/’75 and THE PLAYER/’92, handles the talky situations with easy confidence and has a fine cast (Shepard, Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, an excellent Randy Quaid). It’s the situations that now feel threadbare. Shepard & Basinger get stuck playing the old Can’t-Live-With-‘Em/Can’t-Live-Without-’Em tropes from her Motel abode when he shows up after a two-thousand mile drive just as she’s prepping for a date with Quaid. Everyone talks around the issues that led to the split in that fill-up-the-empty-space manner of early playwrights everywhere, before we finally cast back to psychologically explanatory clichés of parental abandonment before Shepard (as playwright) shuts everything down with a barely motivated conflagration. Do other Shepard plays look this shopworn?
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *The happy exception that proves the rule on ‘Quality’ Cannon product is John Frankenheimer’s 52 PICKUP/’86. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/52-pickup-1986.html
No comments:
Post a Comment