Eric-1226

I really enjoyed this movie. Two disparate people - one, an American art collector (Larry Pine), the other, an elderly but spry British woman (Peggy Ashcroft) who represents a British museum - arrive at a Maharaja's palace in Jodhpur, India and commence a sort of cat-and-mouse competition for the privilege to purchase a large, and apparently quite valuable, collection of old paintings which are in the Maharaja's possession -- a collection which, it seems, the Maharaja may not even be interested in selling.

Apparently it was made for TV, so it wasn't exactly what you would call "big budget," and yet I found it to be a rich feast of images of at least one part of India, both past and present. The scenery in and around the Maharaja's palace (filmed on location at Umaid Bhavan Palace in Jodhpur, India) was quite fascinating. In addition to authentic sets and scenery, there was lots of interesting Indian music, playing not only in the background but also in the "foreground," in the form of a few colorful dance sequences.

For a movie that's scarcely a little more than eighty minutes in length, I thought it held riches galore. The aforementioned scenery and music are only part of the rich tapestry found herein. The plot becomes a bit complex, but in a playful and gently comic manner, so you start to feel good as the story rolls along. The ending has a nice resolution to everything, and leaves you feeling good inside.

The actual paintings, what little we see of them, are quite wondrous, and are probably worth the proverbial price of admission.

Good performances all around, with a very literate script penned by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Of note is the teaming of Victor Banerjee, Peggy Ashcroft, and Saeed Jaffrey, all of whom would later appear together in 1984's "A Passage to India." Also look for a very compelling performance by Aparna Sen, who plays the Maharaja's intelligent, beautiful - and frustrated - sister, Bonnie.

This is an enthralling, informative - and sometimes painful to watch - history of Hitler's precarious hold on power. The series makes clear that lots of people hated Hitler, and truly wanted to bump him off. Many people - both inside Germany as well as outside - put together various plots and schemes to do exactly that, but nearly every effort ended in abysmal failure. Only one or two of the plots really came even close. Some of the plots were downright inspired lunacy, like the proposal offered to New Zealand test pilot A.E. Clouston that he fly a British long-range plane all the way from England to Berlin, bomb Hitler as the fuhrer sat in a parade viewing stand, then high-tail it back to Britain - all on one tank of gas! Clouston thoughtfully and respectfully declined, but the series really makes you ponder the "what if?" aspects of such attempts on Hitler's life.

Anyway, this is a great series for people who want a refresher course on the dark days of Nazi power consolidation and other events leading up to WWII. In addition to footage from after WWII started, the series contains fantastic amounts of footage from the early to late 1930's; also many clips are shown in well-preserved color film. Plus, the series puts things in a global perspective, and also reveals things that make you scratch your head and say, "Wow, I never knew that before!"

I DVR'd the whole series off of the Military Channel. I believe you can go to their website and order the series on DVD. Highly recommended for war and history buffs.

The thought struck me recently that this movie was unfavorably received by critics and audiences alike at the time of its release (1986) because of the celebrity status of the two leading stars - Madonna and Sean Penn. But, if you watch the movie today, some twenty five years later, and if you are able to put the hype and the celebrity status of those two stars out of your mind, then, the movie doesn't seem so bad. In fact, it's actually a pretty good escapist adventure romp along the lines of an Indiana Jones movie.

I watched this movie for the first time just recently, as I was scared away from viewing it all those many years prior, simply because of all the negative hype surrounding it - the hype that said it was a real stinker. But I actually found it to be a pretty engrossing story, with a nicely done cinematography that oozed a colorful, exotic, sometimes even enchanting Oriental atmosphere that was hard to dismiss. Some of the shots, as filmed, were... beautiful! So don't let 1980's critics scare you away: this movie is worth a shot, and if you can mentally distill the two leads down to just being a guy and a girl from 1930's America thrust into an adventure escapade set in a faraway exotic locale, then you just might enjoy this movie for what it was meant to be: pure escapist entertainment.

Not perfect, but then again, NOT the stinker it has been made out to be.