susannah-5

Star Trek: The Motion Picture should have been a big heads up for Treksters that Gene Roddenberry was losing his way -- either that or his vision of Star Trek was always markedly different from what most viewers thought they were seeing.

The studio also had a hand in sending the production down a wrong road, mistaking the popularity of Star Wars, which was released two years earlier, for audience fascination with special effects.

The film is very deliberately paced -- Slow Motion Picture would be a generous subtitle. It lacks virtually all of the charm and humour with which the series was infused. The chemistry between the actors, and so the characters, is entirely absent.

The plot, what there is of it, seems to be based on The Changeling, an episode of the old Star Trek series, and on a bad episode of Space: 1999.

For a real reunion of the crew of the Enterprise, forget this blunder and look at Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Nicholas Meyer knew what virtues make Star Trek the pop-cult phenomenon it is, and he knew how to put it on the big screen.

Murphy's Romance is the kind of film that proves a story can be told about nice people, facing comical and/or difficult circumstances, and be as lively and attention-grabbing as anything else.

Sally Field gives an understated performance as a woman with an unusual occupation (at least for the movies) who starts a new life in a desert town. James Garner, who patented the understated performance, is the local pharmacist (also an unusual occupation for the movies; the last time a pharmacist was even a minor character in a film was probably It's a Wonderful Life), who guides the newcomer toward potential love interests, all the while subtly romancing her himself.

Complications ensue when the good-for-nothing ex-husband turns up, and Field's character's young son gets to contrast his bone-idle dad with a real man. The movie is warm, witty and well-filmed. Alas, James Garner, in his best role, ran into the same problem as Harrison Ford, in his best role: Both were nominated for Oscars the year William Hurt starred in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and at the Oscars, cross-dressing usually trumps everything else.

Oh, wait, that's from Get Smart, not The Avengers.

No matter. As a longtime fan of The Avengers (since childhood), I will say, right off the bat, that this movie did not fail on all levels. If nothing else, the makers of this film understood, at least, what The Avengers was about. This puts them head and shoulders above, say, the makers of The Wild Wild West movie, who had only the most rudimentary (and faulty) knowledge of what made that series an icon of popular American culture.

They might not have been successful in the execution, but they did understand what made The Avengers tick, and if the studio heads hadn't ordered extreme and desperate editing, we might have been able to see more of what the filmmakers imagined.

Two scenes stand out as perfect examples of this understanding: When Mrs. Peel tries to escape by running endlessly down an Escher-like staircase, and when Steed and Mrs. Peel walk on water in giant bubbles. Sean Connery's eccentric megalomaniac (so much more interesting than a serious, conservative megalomaniac) fit right in with the The Avenger's roster of enemies.

Whatever sense of fun the movie had (and The Avengers tv series never seemed to take itself too seriously; does anyone remember Steed being shrunk to the size of a mouse and jabbing a villain in the ankle with a fountain pen?) was destroyed when the nut jobs at the studio fell for the old "edit out what the test audience didn't like" trick, and put a botched film on the screen. Too bad these studio honchos have such weak nerves and such short memories; will they never learn?