kelvis

I endured this on a chartered bus trip from Bangkok to Surat Thani, in south Thailand. Southeast Asian tour buses catering to the backpacker crowd always play bad videos at deafening volume, and it seems some Thai tour operator thought this was what we would like--or maybe someone was trying to be funny. On this particular bus the air conditioner had broken down, so we also were hot, and cramped. So maybe it was just the circumstances that ruined the film for me, but I recall only bad acting and an incoherent plot, which had something to do with an American being held captive, and then somebody blew something up, and then a lot of things got blown up. I was stuck in my uncomfortable seat long enough that I began to identify with the captive, however, and in my misery I examined one actor very closely until it dawned on me--that's Steve Kanaly! Steve Kanaly is best known as Ray Ewing on Dallas, and he also bears an uncanny resemblance to my dad. Unfortunately this would have been lost on most of the others, as few of them were American and fewer still knew my dad. So I kept my thoughts to myself. Then we stopped at a little roadside restaurant and had beer and green curry, and I tried to forget.

Few surprises from Disney in the tale of two East German families who escape to the West in a homemade hot air balloon. Director Delbert Mann gives sometimes slack pacing to what could have been a taut thriller, and the dialog is at times stilted. Still, the players give fine readings of what they have to work with, excepting possibly Doug McKeon (familiar as On Golden Pond's recalcitrant teen), whose performance smacks more of the San Fernando Valley than Saxony. Mann doesn't skimp on East Bloc clichés like spying neighbors and a scarcity of fresh produce, but it is frighteningly effective when the police start throwing their totalitarian weight around. Of course, the movies are full of mean, authoritarian Germans who, regardless of their ideological leaning, dress neatly and shout orders in heavily accented English; Günter Meisner, who plays the chief communist baddie, gave much the same performance in The Winds of War miniseries as a famous anticommunist, Hitler. Still, even if a lot of this is B-grade stuff, the flight sequences are beautifully filmed, with the usual Disney flair. This also is interesting as one of a series of adult-themed films Disney produced in the late 70s and early 80s (The Devil and Max Devlin, The Watcher in the Woods), as the studio struggled to define itself in the post-post-Walt (but pre-Michael Eisner) years.

Mixed success of a newspaper film, in which hard-boiled sportswriter Tracy convinces Hepburn, a worldly wise columnist covering the Second World War, of the virtues of feminine domesticity, 1940s style. There are several convulsively funny moments, as when Tracy mistakenly appears on stage at Hepburn's feminist rally and then cannot find his way off stage. However, this putatively cosmopolitan comedy too frequently missteps: the late twentieth century viewer cringes when Tracy refers to the "towel" a turban-wearing character has on, and thoroughly dismaying is the final sequence, in which Hepburn utterly humiliates herself by inadvertently including yeast in a waffle recipe, as Tracy triumphantly looks on; woe betide all of us too busy to be handy in the kitchen. Perhaps most unforgivable is the treatment of a hapless child, a war refugee who briefly enjoys a glamorous Manhattan lifestyle, as Hepburn's adoptee, only to be shunted back to the orphanage (and forgotten) as the plot warrants. Still, the Hepburn and Tracy chemistry is memorable in this, their first film together, and the scene in which Tracy is mistaken for a Gestapo agent is not to be missed.