Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Saturday, June 4, 2022

A RAGE TO LIVE (1965)

A bestseller in 1949; passé by 1965, film adaptations of John O’Hara’s major novels ended not with a bang, but with this whimper.  Where O’Hara projects once attracted stars like Liz Taylor, Paul Newman, Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, here tv director Walter Grauman gets Suzanne Pleshette, Bradford Dillman & Ben Gazzara, none able to ‘carry’ a film.  Pleshette, playing a Country Club nymphomaniac, thinks she can walk the straight & narrow by marrying Dillman’s butter-and-egg man (he’s actually a wealthy farmer), then can’t say no to the swarthy testosterone lure of Gazzara.  Perhaps if done as a period piece with the sweep & glossy TechniColored production values of Douglas Sirk melodrama, along with his critical social objectivity, the simplified psychological details strengthened by tongue-and-groove joined story beats, it could still make an effect.  But everything’s all so earnest, you can’t even giggle at it.  Well, almost can’t.  Not when you’ve got local newspaper editor Peter Graves hitting on Suzanne Pleshette.  Talk about mission impossible.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Are the O’Hara novels still read?  His short stories certainly should be.  None of the big film adaptations do well by him (embarrassments like PAL JOEY/’57 and BUTTERFIELD 8/’60).  The one exception his great film-biz novella NATICA JACKSON, made as a one-hour PBS film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Hector Elizondo as part of 1987's ‘Tales of the Hollywood Hills’ series.  Alas, only available intercut with another episode from the show.  A real loss.

No comments: