Forgive the awkward title, combining two Jackie Collins novels into one movie, because we come back to worship at the altar of Ms. Collins, after such success with "Hollywood Wives." (http://mmarathon.blogspot.com/2011/05/hollywood-wives-1985.html) "Lucky Chances" brings to life Lucky Santangelo, Collins' most beloved character, one who, at this writing in August 2011, is about to return to the page in a brand new novel, as well as her colorful father and various other family members.
If "Lucky Chances" isn't as giddy as "Hollywood Wives," forgive that too. Nothing can top the latter, and by 1990, a sad decorum had already started to settle over the miniseries (which was never as racy a medium as it thought it was) that would try to blunt Collins' style (but never kill it), a fact made even more obvious by the next Lucky Santangelo film outing, "Lady Boss."
However, that doesn't mean "Lucky Chances" is free of guilty pleasures, because this is the world of Jackie Collins, after all, and as long as her name is on anything (and she wrote the screenplay here), we're in heavenly hands. Perhaps ONLY Jackie Collins could have had "Lucky Chances" filmed by 1990, when the other mistresses of the beach read were playing it so much safer (take your pick, snooze through Danielle Steel or Judith Krantz, as we learned from 90s duds "Zoya" and "Dazzle"). That's what you get for being dainty. Ever the lady, Jackie Collins was the only one still also a broad.
Swinging Las Vegas, 1969, which looks like it's actually swinging Las Vegas 1989, but Vegas hasn't really changed all that much, I suppose. Lucky herself, a va-va-va-voom Nicolette Sheridan, in a white clingy number cut up and down to there, is not happy that her father is returning. "You know he's never going to give me credit for building the hotel," she complains to heavily made-up Alan Rosenberg. "I just want him to appreciate what I'm capable of achievement. I just want us to be a family again. I'm his daughter and I love him. If he can't accept what I've done, then there's going to be a power struggle," she says. Wow, that's an awful lot of pressure, no? Alan's response is exactly what you would suggest, even if you haven't met these characters before: "you and your father are exactly alike."
And with that, we dart back to the past, New York City, 1933. Oh, come on! The minute you saw Alan's heavy make-up and heard Nicolette bitching about her father, you knew it was only a lead-in to a flashback. It is a miniseries, after all, and that does tend to be the way they unravel.
Daytime soap hunk Vincent Irizarry is Gino Santangelo, a wise-ass sitting at a table entertaining his friends when in comes his business partner, daytime AND nighttime hunk Michael Nader (from sister Joan's "Dynasty"), with a scary, "we gotta talk." Michael, doing the same sort of Italian accent everyone did after Brando in "The Godfather," is worried that bootlegging is on its way out and they need a new angle. "If you're talkin' moving drugs and sellin' hookers, you're on your own," Vincent says. "What are you, huh, a priest? We can't ease into other areas without you losing sleep?" Michael replies. Vincent has a perfectly good reason, a sister who died from a drug overdose.
The cliches, they keep a-rollin' along, when Vincent sees a fancy car with a fancy blonde in it and tells his pal, "that's what I want...everything!" He's in a speakeasy later when in swoops Mary Frann, all done up to look like a cross between Mae West, Ann-Margaret and Shirley Temple, who tells her companion, "I just adore dives like this." Naturally, Vincent only has eyes for the rich dame. She can't help but notice him either and asks the owner about him. When she finds out he's a bootlegger, she gives the owner her card for him, because she needs some hooch. "Slumming is so amusing," she remarks to her husband, Richard Anderson, when she returns home. "And I might have spotted a new friend," telling him about Vincent. Apparently, she's very open about her life, and her husband accepts it all. It's even freakier than you think. For the party, she tells her husband, she's found an act: "two girls, one white, one Negro, are going to do an incredible dance and striptease. Tres risque!" Not a moment too soon, Jackie Collins has officially stepped in!
The black girl mentioned above would be Anne-Marie Johnson, introduced while being injected with a needle full of dope by Jimmie Skaggs. "You're gonna shine," he insists, and she asks, "how many men you gonna make me sleep with?" He assures her, "this is your first step on the road to stardom...and don't forget who put you there." She tries to resist, but he's not actually giving her a choice.
When Vincent arrives at Mary's mansion, he's met by a snooty butler who insists on knowing his "surname," which Vincent loudly spells out for him. To the butler's chagrin, Vincent is allowed inside. In fact, Mary is all too happy to see him, at least it sounds like she is, because one can't see her face through the filters. This is a dame who can play uppity and sling it with the worst of 'em. "In the past, we've been sold bathtub gin, watered-down whiskey, all kinds of bootleg hooch. I'm sure you only supply quality merchandise," she insists before placing her very large order. "Anything you want, I got," Vincent replies. He's also invited to attend the party, black-tie, of course.
A few moments after Jimmie and his girls arrive, Vincent finally shows up, to be greeted by Richard and told, "my wife tells me everything, absolutely everything." Exactly what that means, Vincent still has yet to find out. Richard then watches eagerly from across the room as Mary flirts with dateless Vincent. "I think you have a very exciting future and I want to be part of it," she decides, to a still-clueless Vincent.
Mary announces the entertainment and on come the girls, doing a shimmy and a half, though Anne-Marie can barely stand up she's so high. Mary is not at all pleased. "Looks like she's on dope," Vincent guesses. "Don't be ridiculous," Mary snaps. Wait, why is that so hard to believe? You didn't exactly order Fred and Adele Astaire, Mary. Anne-Marie collapses and has to be carried out. Jimmie and his other girl bolt quickly. Vincent insists on calling a doctor. "Can't do that, scandal," Richard warns and has Vincent take her somewhere safe.
When she wakes up at his pad, Anne-Marie asks Vincent who he is. "Oh, come on! You gotta remember me, you threw up all over my tux. I had to buy the damn thing." There's a memory worth copping too! She denies her drug usage, saying she's fine. "If you weren't so fine, you'd be dead," Vincent snaps at her. She's only afraid at what pimp Jimmie will do if he finds out she's drying out. Vincent will be her protector. "And what do you want?" "I don't want nothing." "I don't believe it." "Force yourself, kid." Oh, yeah! Now that's how it's done! Go on with the snappy dialogue!
Mary is very appreciative, but Vincent has his his morals, telling her, "you're a married lady and I don't play baseball on a full field." Okay, that's a clunker of a line, but let's just chalk it up to a not-very-bright character being the one to say it. Mary assures Vincent, "my husband is impotent" and it's therefore perfectly fine for them to get it on, "and I'll show you how to do a lot more than play baseball." She slows him down when he paws her like an ape and he cracks, "nobody tells me how to do this. I got a degree in it." "Then tear it up. I'm going to teach you everything you think you already know." The deed is done and Vincent becomes Mary's official boy toy.
Vincent is so cocky, he wants to toss aside Michael, who is running the drugs Vincent told him not to run. "You want out, you're out, but you're gonna regret it, sucker!" Michael snarls. Now we have the enemy-for-life all arranged as well. Anne-Marie is still at Vincent's, but she's well enough to cook, though still wondering what it is he wants. He's so helpful that he wants to get her a real job and he even told the pimp she left town. "Everyone deserves a chance, kid, and I'm yours," he says with the confidence of a fairy godmother. As you can imagine, Jimmie has not given up on finding her, vowing to find her and make her pay! We can guess that he'll return just when life is at an apex of happiness for Anne-Marie.
While Mary does a hot-cha tango with every man in the joint, Richard and Vincent discuss business. Vincents says Anne-Marie needs a job and Richard knows a man who needs a maid. "Speaking of business..." Richard starts, and offers Vincent an actual liquor company for when Prohibition ends. "Just give me the deal. Whatever it is, you can count me in," our trusting hero says, not bothering with the terms.
Vincent puts Anne-Marie in a cab and wishes her well when his old pal Alan Rosenberg returns to "the old neighborhood," a lawyer about to be married. The theatrical producer who hires Anne-Marie as a maid is none other than David McCallum. He asks for references and when she says she doesn't have her, offers her the job ("my housekeeper can teach you everything you need to know"). Where do I get in on that kind of interview? At Alan's wedding, Vincent asks Alan to be "my advisor," because we know that every mobster has to have a trusted legal pal on hand. It's never an exciting role, but someone has to play it. Dependable Alan Rosenberg is game, though playing Italian is a bit of a stretch. Just then, a little girl comes and asks Vincent to dance. "One day, I'm going to marry a man just like you, I promise," she gushes. Yup, all the pieces are falling into place, though the huge age gap between them will no doubt becomes a lot smaller when she grows up to be played by...well, we'll get there eventually.
Four years later, Anne-Marie has worked her way up to being David's "personal assistant." She's toiled for him all that time and it's only after four years he bothers to ask about her past life. She declines to rehash the story, noting that "I've never felt so secure as I have working for you." And apparently all this time, he's also nursed a crush on her, finally asking her to out. She declines that too, citing a previous engagement, a double date with one of the maids.
In the ensuing years, Vincent has opened a club in partnership with Richard, naming it after Mary. Alan informs him one night that Mary is coming in with some friends. "Ah, another rent-a-stud group," Vincent says breezily. Wouldn't you know, it's that very night that Anne-Marie and her maid friend go to the very same club, where Anne-Marie is warned, "these gentleman got money, so be nice!" Next to arrive is Michael Nader. Vincent is thrilled that Michael is there, so he can show him his success and cozy up to him in case he ever needs him, because I suppose gangsters have short memories. "Better the snake you stroke than the one you strangle," he tells worried Alan. That's an interesting way to put it.
Anne-Marie can't stand the grabby drunk date she's been given. She's become a very good girl, doesn't even want to fake being nice for a rich guy. Mary flaunts her men for Vincent. "I see you're in the education business again," he chortles. "Well, it's so rewarding," she coos. Walking over to loud Michael's table, Vincent warns him, "calm down...this is a classy joint, act like you've been in one before." Michael is not happy with Vincent's smarmy friendliness.
It's then that worlds collide, as we expected with the gang all here. Michael gets up from the table and bumps into Anne-Marie. "Hey, I thought this was a classy joint. It's all full of Coloreds," he yells. Vincent orders him tossed out and goes to apologize to Anne-Marie, whom he at first doesn't recognize. It's a lovely reunion, even a bit flirty. "This is turning out to be the best night I can remember," she rhapsodizes over champagne. "I always try to look after my friends," he sweetly replies while staring at her in a brand new way. She tells him that her boss and he and the only "two guys who never tried to take advantage of me." "It's not that I didn't want to. You weren't ready," he remarks. "Am I ready now?" Yup, because before another line can be uttered, they are in bed together laughing. "That was something else, baby," he raves. "And I didn't think I even remembered how," she breathes.
But that happy moment goes sour quickly. He gives her cab fare and tells her, "if there's anything left over, buy yourself a little trinket." She hurls the money at his face, snarling, "you still think I'm just a whore." His reply is not exactly wise. "Hey, wait a minute, what are you talkin' about?" he asks, dropping every g he can see in the script, "if I thought you were a whore, I would have handed you the goin' rate. Come on, the money's just a present. I give it to all my girlfriends, what's the big deal?" Wow, that's, um, well, insensitive, to put it politely. It only angers her further. The rest of the scene follows a predictable dialogue path and she storms out.
Whatever, Anne-Marie is small potatoes, because Richard has agreed to back Vincent's idea to build a hotel in Las Vegas. "I don't get it. You service his wife, he ends up giving you money," Alan jokes as they celebrate the good news. "I wish it was always that simple."
So does Anne-Marie, who finds out she's preggers. She therefore sneaks out of David's house and life.
Whoosh, we're off to Vegas. Vincent's "Sierra Hotel and Casino" is being built, a dream of eight years. "This is my dream and it's gonna be a smash," he tells doubting Alan, who can't understand erecting it in the middle of the desert. Las Vegas has opened up a whole new farm of girls for him as well.
Whoosh, we're back on the East Coast. Anne-Marie has been flourishing, having opened up a very successful brothel, under Michael Nader's protection. When two men show up insisting that she pay Jimmie (he doesn't know it's Anne-Marie running it), she complains to one of the girls that this is the only thing she knows how to do to support her son. "It's not like you do anything," the girl replies, meaning turning tricks. "He's my past and if he ever finds me," she says, dramatically referring to Jimmie, a pimp with an exceedingly long memory, "I'm finished."
Remember the little girl Vincent danced with at the wedding all those years ago? The one I said would someday become older and somehow make the age difference between them seem less than two decades? Bingo! She's now Sandra Bullock! She shows up at Alan's house, where Alan's wife is hounding Vincent about finding a wife. It takes some prompting to remember her, though he's already captivated by her luxurious hair and pleasant demeanor. In fact, he refers to her as "Little Miss Innocent" and her mother is dead (always convenient in these stories). "I'm 18. I think that's old enough to do just about anything I want," she announces. What she wants is him, so she pounces and when they are on the ground, she goes further, saying she wants to marry him, and has ever since that wedding dance. Her memory is even better than Jimmie the Pimp's! He demures. "What's wrong with me?" "That's just it, kid, there's nothing wrong with you." She vows to wait until he changes his mind.
Though Sandra's Uncle Alan warns Vincent about getting involved with his precious rosebud of a niece, it's said niece who does all the pursuing. She makes sure to spend as much time with Vincent as possible. "I don't know what I'm doin'," Vincent tells her at their umpteenth meal in a row, "but I wanna do it with you." Thankfully, Sandra isn't any brighter than Vincent, and easy to please, so a fey line like that still makes her smile.
Jimmie shows up at Anne-Marie's flesh palace demanding money, but Anne-Marie hides behind the bar and allows one of the girls to take her place. Knowing that Jimmie will eventually find her, she places a call to Vincent, but he's busy, she's told. Getting married. We have our second massive Italian wedding in less than an hour. As expected, because no happiness is without sadness in a miniseries, there is bad news: Richard and Mary were killed in a car accident on their way to the wedding.
There is someone Anne-Marie can turn to besides Vincent, loyal David McCallum, so she dresses down and calls him. "Eight years ago, I invited you to dinner. Does it always take you this long to accept?" he jokes as they have a meal. He doesn't even ask what she's been doing or why she slipped away without an explanation. He promises to protect her and her son. Even better, he marries her, unafraid of skin color barriers or her son's presence.
Without Richard's money, the casino cannot continue, and there is only one place Vincent can turn for the cash, to Michael Nader. It's rather impressive that Vincent hasn't managed to save a dime in 12 or so years. Vincent offers to cut him in, as long as "there are no drugs involved."
On a money-collecting visit to the whorehouse, Jimmie sees a picture of Anne-Marie and explodes with fury. "Whatever it takes, I'm gonna get her!" he tells new proprietress.
Sandra gives birth to a girl. The name? "Well, it ain't Amy or Sara or Victoria, none of them proper names. We're namin' our kid Lucky," he tells Alan. Phew! I was expecting Kal-El, Shiloh, Moon Unit, or at the very least, Jermajesty. A not-entirely-welcome Michael shows up at the hospital with a giant stuffed animal, asking to be the girl's godfather, a request no one can refuse.
Two years later, the Sierra finally opens. Alan is still upset they had to use Michael's "stinking money," but Vincent is realistic. Without it, they could never have opened the hotel. "Once the money starts rollin' in," Vincent figures he can buy out Michael, though Alan doubts Michael will ever want to sell. Opening night is like a Hollywood premiere. Michael arrives with two girls, and Vincent with Sandra, pregnant again. Because of their long association, even Jimmie is there, so Michael tells him to "move in nice and slow" to get their business made a part the casino. Vincent and Jimmie remember each other, though Vincent gets as far away from Jimmie as possible as quickly as possible. "Something I like about this deal," Michael notes to Jimmie, "[Vincent] does all the work, we get all the money." These two get more bad-guy cardboard with every passing scene.
Another four years slip by. Vincent has to bolt Las Vegas to celebrate his daughter's birthday. Wrapped in Sandra's arms and loving his two kids at the birthday party, Vincent gets a call from Alan, who "has proof" that Michael has been "laundering money through the hotel." So, right back to Vegas huffs our Vincent, to the disappointment of Sandra and his daughter. After Vincent leaves, slimy Jimmie shows up at the house looking for Anne-Marie and giving Sandra the creeps.
Upon arrival at the Vegas airport, Vincent is met by Alan and Grant Show, who has been undercover in Michael's organization and who has proof of the drugs and hookers Alan had warned him about. "How many of our people are involved?" Vincent asks. "Five." "Fire them." He needs some quick cash in order to be rid of Michael. At a midnight meeting, Vincent tells Michael, "you're out." Michael goes into a heavy whisper to ask, "who the hell do you think you're talking to?" It seems Vincent has his enemy-for-life back.
Revenge is swift. Little Lucky discovers Sandra floating in the pool covered in blood.
Things are still rocking in Vegas, 1962. Vincent is gray and sports a mustache. He's having problems with daughter Nicolette and wants to dump her in boarding school. He's still feeling guilty about Sandra's death, though Alan reminds him it was merely a robbery, that the guys responsible "were killed in a shoot-out" and even missing jewelry was found. Dumb, right? They all believe it! Nicolette is apparently just like her father, but the brother? "He wants to go to art school...he's got long hair!" Vincent carps, unable to understand his son.
Nicolette, sporting a wig that is supposed to look like Sandra's hair, but in reality is, I suspect, someone's carpet, is not happy to be going to boarding school, as she confides in her brother, Harold Pruett (who, very noticeably, does NOT have long hair). "I wish I could go to art school like you," she says. Harold says tell dad that. "You try telling him, he's the king of the "I know everything,'" she says in a silly voice. "Daddy's not gonna miss me, he's never around," so it's only the "security guards" and "maids" who will miss her. She will certainly miss Grant, who works for her father and for whom she has the hots.
At a fancy boarding school run by a fancy British matron, Nicolette gets to bunk with Shawnee Smith, who cracks that she's "completing a six month prison term." Shawnee says something nasty about about Vincent, and Nicolette barks at her, but Shawnee says, "we all have our crosses to bear," that her father is an exceedingly wealthy Greek tycoon. Thankfully, this will not end up as the Christina Onassis story. "I know where you can find cigarettes, booze, drugs, boys, sex. You name it, I got it all under control," Shawnee tells a very impressed Nicolette. Lickety split, the girls are sneaking from the dorm, off to the nearest watering hole and riding motorcycles (sans helmets) with cute boys. Shawnee, however, sees a problem. "I keep introducing you to all these hot sexy guys and you don't seem interested. What's the problem? You don't like boys?" she asks. No, no, it's just that she's hung up on Grant, "who is an old man, but who is incredibly great." He's only 30, and Shawnee finds that "acceptable." Well, with her approval, what can POSSIBLY go wrong? Shawnee offers to teach her "how to get noticed" by Grant.
As for Vincent, he's shacking up with movie star Audrey Landers, who spent the 80s under the sheets on "Dallas" and elsewhere, thus her first scene is post-coital with Vincent. "You kept me in bed far too long," she says suggestively after a marathon of sex. The two go off to a party for Senator Charles Frank (Vincent asks if Audrey is sleeping with him and reminds her that it doesn't matter if she is--after all, he went to Mary Frann's School of Sex is Just For Fun).
Nicolette and Shawnee are expelled from school, but before the headmistress can call Vincent, Nicolette arranges for Harold to get the call and pretend he's their father, giving permission for her to leave with Shawnee's chauffeur.
Anne-Marie's son has grown up to be a lawyer, Phil Morris, whom we meet somehow finding his friend Tim Ryan's DOA stand-up comedy show actually funny. Even Tim's girlfriend Leann Hunley can't force that much laughter. As for Phil's parents, they are still happily married, still very much in love, though there are friends putting pressure on her to write her autobiography. She will not, but when it's suggested that she write a book on "personal style," that interests her. No doubt Jimmie reads all books on "personal style," so he'll be finding her. Phil had been cheered by everyone for a success in court, getting an accused rapist off, but it turns out that the guy really was guilty. Freed from prison, he not only raped again, but killed his accuser's mother.
"I can't reach you, can I? We make love, but we're never together. I don't know what you're thinking," Audrey complains to Vincent, wasting a perfectly good lace teddy on a man who is just wearing striped pajama bottoms. The conversation is pretty idiotic, with Audrey, as a dim bulb movie star, trying to penetrate his mind. He doesn't mind that she is doing the Senator too. Not that he asked, but she launches into a speech about how she "has a need to be with important men." Get this, she wants to be "part of it" if the Senator runs for President, even if it's just as his movie-star mistress. Good self-esteem, toots! "I'm not as dumb as some people think I look," Audrey notes after telling Vincent she has pictures of her and the Senator, more as an FYI than anything else. "Nobody can be that dumb," Vincent replies. Once again, he's not very smooth. Even Audrey bristles at that crack, but only as a lead-in to more sex. With Audrey asleep, Vincent hunts for the pictures, quickly finding them.
In St. Tropez, Nicolette and Shawnee are having fun doing "Le Twist," but Nicolette can't keep up with Shawnee. "You are like a bitch in heat," she castigates her pal. "Can I help if it every man I meet wants me?" Shawnee asks. Tiring of the hedonism, Nicolette calls her father, who flies out on Shawnee's father's plane. Shawnee's father is not a fat bald Onassis knock-off, but instead dashing daytime soap legend Eric Braeden. When the dads arrive, Nicolette says Shawnee is "in the bedroom, where else?"
Not surprisingly, Anne-Marie's book is a smash hit. She and David are not worried about any secrets spilling out because they have reinvented her past as an "African princess." They have even lied to Phil (now working for the DA), telling him his father is dead. Hmmmm, a crusading DA and the mobster father he doesn't know existed.
In its second hour, as things are becoming way too rote, Vincent assures his wayward daughter he'll snap her back into line and then delivers Audrey's pictures to the Senator just so the man will owe him a favor. It's a damn big one! He marries Nicolette off to the Senator's son, Robert Duncan McNeill. Done up in a hideous wedding dress that speaks of all money and not taste, Nicolette grumpily marries Robert. "I thought brides were supposed to be happy," remarks brother Harold. "Yeah, brides are supposed to be able to choose their own husbands," she snaps back. She confides in (her) godfather Michael Nader that her father thinks "this is the way he can control me," so Michael offers to help any way he can.
Four years later, we've reached 1967. Anne-Marie has become the grande dame of the social scene, but takes a few minutes out of her day to have lunch with Phil, who confides in her that he's going after organized crime, both Michael and Vincent. Yup, we called that one! Understandably, Anne-Marie is not happy at this "Madame X"-ish turn of events (unknowing son prosecuting father rather than defending mother). Anne-Marie calls Vincent to meet him for the first time since huffing off the night they had sex. She warns him about what her son is up to. "I don't understand, how come you're taking that kind of a risk?" he asks. Anne-Marie has to tell him the truth about Phil's parentage.
After five years of marriage, Nicolette and Robert still have no kids. So, Robert asks outright, "you wanna make a baby?" "No thanks," Nicolette dryly replies. "My parents really want us to do this," he reports, as if that's going to sway her, so she goes out for a drive. "You spend more time in our car than you do in our bed," he shouts. Robert, it could be that old-man pajama set you wear, but she'll never be yours.
On a call with her brother, where she tells him she has to get out of the marriage, he informs her that Vincent has summoned them both to New York. "You can't go running off to New York without me, what will people think?" Robert bleats, one more nail in his coffin. "Our marriage was a joke from the beginning. Now it's over." The Senator is actually happy to be rid of her. The kids go to see Vincent, who starts off on the wrong foot, telling Harold, "you look like one of those Hippies or something out a rock group, go get yourself a hair cut." Grant and Alan are there as well, so Nicolette orders Grant to get her a scotch, "and don't water it down. I'm not a little girl anymore." "I can see that," says Grant, finally noticing her after all these years.
Vincent announces that he has to leave the country. Why? For some reason, he wants his minions to answer, so Grant explains that the IRS has been after him. "I've paid enough damn taxes to run the White House for 20 damn years," Vincent spits out. The facts are these: Harold will go to Vegas and learn the hotel business and Nicolette, who is actually interested in it "is just a woman, a married woman, who is going to stay with her husband and have a baby or two." Oh, no! Oh, no! Vincent has said the wrong thing (again) to the wrong woman. Nicolette comes out hissing, to upbraiding from her father. "I ain't a lady!" she reminds him, "and while you're away, I'm going to prove it, bet on it!"
As promised, Nicolette rises to the top of the company, which is building a new hotel, though she says it's been "a struggle." "What struggle?" her brother asks, "you pushed everyone out of the way and took over." She's left design to her brother, legal to Alan, construction to Grant and "I love running the show." She goes looking for Grant while her brother smirks. "You can wipe that little smile off your mind," she says, tossing off one of the best lines so far, explaining that her crush on Grant is long in the past.
She takes Grant over to the new hotel construction site where they engage in a little banter before business. He compliments her on looking great, "for a kid."
"Very funny."
"I am to please."
"Yeah, every bimbo in Vegas. Don't you ever get tired."
"Only in the rainy season."
That's some good stuff!
After a board meeting, Nicolette is told investors are dropping out because they don't believe in her, but she assures Alan that she can get the money from her former father-in-law. Grant takes her to the airport for more banter. Oh, and I should point out that we're somewhere in the late 60s now, but everyone looks like the 80s. Nicolette Sheridan looks like she's wearing her fanciest "Knots Landing" costumes.
According to Nicolette, she deserves the Senator's money because she stayed married to his son for five years, but he tells her he was blackmailed into the marriage, a fact she never knew. "You bastard," she hisses, though she can hardly be angry at him. Then she turns to Michael. "If I come in on this deal, nobody's gotta know but you and me," he tells his goddaughter. He only wants "a big part of the action," which goes undefined. Alan and Grant aren't thrilled with not knowing where the money is coming from, but Phil is. His insiders in Michael's organization have just given them a new way of getting to Michael.
We're back to where the movie started, the opening of the new casino, all in 18 months, no less. "I see you dressed up for the occasion," Nicolette tells Grant, sporting a tux. "I see you undressed for it," he retorts, nothing her form-fitting gown. Grant thinks "it's about time to talk," a euphemism for what the two really want, especially her! When Michael shows up, he tells Alan he's the source of the money, which angers him to no end. "I'm here to stay, get used to it!" Michael growls.
"Is the reality going to be as good as the fantasy?" Nicolette asks Grant right before their first and very passionate kiss. They start what promises to be a good sex scene, but are, of course, cut off. Alan is looking for them, so we rejoin them after it's over and Nicolette is thrilled with the way it's turned out, wanting more. "I need a ten minute break," he insists. "Make it five and you've got a deal."
The next morning, Nicolette and Grant are due to have breakfast with Alan and his wife. Nicolette admits she's in love and just as Grant is walking over, a shot rings out and he falls dead. Never proclaim your happiness in a miniseries! That's when it all falls apart. Alan insists Michael is behind the murder, but Nicolette refuses to believe it. However, she goes to Michael, who doesn't give her five seconds in the door before suggesting a suspect, and a vacation for Nicolette, while his guys "watch the bank." She says her brother can handle things. "You're the one with the stones in the family, no offense," he clucks.
It's been threatened for some time, but finally, Vincent returns. "I have to warn you, there's not way you're shutting me out, no way," Nicolette insists. "Who said I wanted to?" he asks. "I'm proud of you, kid, I really am." Praise was the last thing Nicolette expected. He's only upset because Michael is on board, but they will work on that together. A big hug, their first, sets things right. "For the record, you both did a great job," Vincents tells both kids. They are over the moon with his praise. Outside Vincent's apartment, they are thrilled with the way things are going, Nicolette promises to get rid of Michael and offers Harold a ride, but he only has a few blocks to walk. So do the two goons following him.
When Nicolette returns to Vincent's that night, one of Michael's best henchmen is there. He is the mole for the FBI and is willing to sing for cash before telling the feds all and going into witness protection. He tells them of Grant's murder and then the shocker, of Sandra's murder. Well, that would be a shock to only those who weren't paying any attention.
We lurch into high Jackie Collins now! Nicolette, Vincent and Alan leave the building just as a car drives by and dumps Harold's dead body on the curb. Seeing it, Vincent grabs his left arm with a heart attack. "Daddy, don't worry. I know what I gotta do," Nicolette tells him as he's being wheeled into surgery.
Suddenly Nicolette knows how to pull off an assassination. Put on dark clothes, jump the fence, bang on Michael's front door. Michael is not happy to be woken up at 3am to purportedly talk about Vincent's return. "I thought that we should deal with it now. I thought that we should deal with it the way you dealt with my mother," she says. "Maybe you should get rid of me too, or you'll never know whose side I'm on," she adds. "You're a lunatic," Michael growls. He would know, after all. "If I tell you to get out of here, bitch, get out of here!" Michael reaches for a gun, which Nicolette says is not loaded, she pushes him up against the wall in slow motion and a shot rings out.
Vegas, 1970. Nicolette is found "not guilty for reasons of self defense." There wasn't a whole lot of suspense there, even if Lucky Santangelo would not be Jackie Collins' main character for the next umpteen years. She's the leading lady and leading ladies don't go to prison, especially not for killing scum like Michael Nader. Only Michael's son, Luca Bercovici, isn't happy, threatening Nicolette. It's him the FBI (Phil) wants, and they have been at the trial the whole time. To add grease to his fire, he's now dating Leann. Leann tells Phil Luca is "my producer...for the movie I'm going to be in." "That is private property, mine!" Luca tells Phil referring to Leann. Also with Luca is our dear old friend, Jimmie the pimp.
In fact, nearly everyone is assembled. Leann's ex, comedian Tim Ryan, has a gig in Las Vegas.
Vincent is the host of a party for movie star Liliana Komorowska, where Nicolette will get to meet Vincent's new main squeeze, Stephanie Beacham (we've had to wait over three hours for her!). Also at the table is Nicolette's former roomie, Shawnee Smith and her father, Eric Braeden. Shawnee (with rock star boyfriend William Shockley in tow) is still bitter about Nicolette calling her father years ago, but Nicolette doesn't bother with her, only with Eric. Nicolette and Stephanie do not hit it off well, which is thrilling as a viewer, because we haven't had a three-dimensional villain yet. Stephanie manages to take over in just a matter of minutes. "What do you think about little Lucky," Vincent asks Stephanie, who replies, with dead-on timing, "she's not so little. She can look after herself, and you can look after me."
Tim's act has actually gotten worse over the years. In fact, it relies on sexist humor to tickle the three people gathered to watch. Nicolette is not amused, so she huffs back to Tim's dressing room, where he's in nothing but boxer shorts. "Want to quit staring? You make me feel like Burt Reynolds on a good day," he jokes. "Your material could use an update," she tells him before demanding he take out the anti-woman humor. "Hey, sweetheart, you have a problem, take it up with the management," he yells as she's leaving. "I'd be happy to," she says sweetly, never revealing who she is. "Fire him," she commands as soon as she walks away.
Eric takes Nicolette on a yacht ride on Lake Mead and wants to go into business with her, not her father, who has also made overtures (based on Nicolette's suggestion). She calls dad and lays it on the line: Eric and she will be handling business, not him.
Tail between his legs, Tim goes to live with Phil, who puts him up as a way to get to Luca. He wants Tim to call Leann, though Tim tries to avoid involvement. "How's my career going?" Leann bubbles when Luca returns home. "Don't worry, you're gonna see a script soon. My investors loved those photos of you," he replies.
Not happy to be dragged to a charity benefit is Vincent. Stephanie warns him, "you better get used to it. I do a lot of charity work." He's too worried about Nicolette, a subject that bores Stephanie. He mentions Sandra and Harold's murders and all she can say is, "the past is behind you." Delicious! At the charity event, Stephanie is dying to meet Anne-Marie. She and Vincent have to pretend to know each other, but agree to meet for lunch the next day.
Eric has Nicolette over for a romantic dinner, but she's all business, proposing a casino in Atlantic City for when gambling becomes legal there. He has no business on his mind. "I intend to know you very well indeed," Eric announces and then the two dance in his room alone. "You're very beautiful, very exciting," he notes, and she adds, "and very demanding." He goes in for the clinch, her first since Grant's death. She slips off her dress and tells him, "bring the champagne...I'm going to make you very very thirsty." They do the deed, as expected, and he tells her, "you can build the hotel of your dreams in Atlantic City. I'll back you."
At lunch, Vincent warns Anne-Marie that not only has he seen Phil, but also Jimmie. "Don't worry about it, he'll never put it together," he assures her. Famous last words. He then offers any help Phil may ever need, but she doesn't intend to reveal the secret of Phil's real father.
Bad news, at least for Nicolette. Vincent is marrying Stephanie and his idea is that they will spend weekdays in LA and weekends in Las Vegas, so Nicolette can run everything during the week and then he takes over on the weekends. Needless to say, that doesn't sit well with Nicolette. "Nobody dances center stage when I'm around," Vincent argues when Nicolette throws a fit. This escalates into a melee that should be fodder for Tim's comedy. Vincent tells her to get married and have kids as "that's what women are supposed to do." Nicolette exits dramatically and Vincent tells her never to come back.
Anne-Marie is widowed (not that we've seen David in eons). Phil, of course, is his mother's rock of support, but worried "about my own mortality," she tells her son the truth about his father. Phil is definitely not happy to hear Vincent is his papa. "He'll be there for you if you ever need him, honey," Anne-Marie assures him. He'll never need "a man like that!" he assures her and wants to continue thinking David is the only father he's ever needed.
Nicolette finds out she's pregnant, so get the bouzouki players tuned up, because she has to get hitched to Eric, and it has to be on a Greek island with all the Greek cliche trappings (plus pouty Shawnee and her boyfriend). "Young and the Restless" fans have probably never seen Eric do Greek dancing, but he joins the line and does just that, complete with shouts of "opa." "Tell me, what is it that attracts you to my father, his age or his bankroll," Shawnee asks. I guess we are going to do Christina Onassis after all.
Three years later, Tim is the toast of Las Vegas, playing the big room, having traded in sexist humor for New York City jokes. In the audience are Shawnee and her boyfriend, as well as Leann and Luca, who supplies them with drugs, and of course, Phil. Tim and Phil discuss Leann's movie, which was "a porno." On her way to the ladies room, Leann tries to talk to Phil, but Luca's goon hustles her along. Shawnee sidles over to Vincent's table, where she sets her sights on Tim. That leaves Luca to invite solo William to his table to meet Leann, who is "very accommodating." Luca tells everyone it was "my father's money that built this hotel." Williams thought Nicolette did that, and Luca explodes, promised that "if she ever returns to this country, she's going to pay for what she did to my father." He doesn't really get the idea of a vendetta, does he? It can be carried out anywhere; geography should be no hindrance.
Tim and Shawnee drink and drug themselves into such a stupor that they wind up getting married that same night.
Greece isn't exactly Nicolette's idea of fun. "I'm too young for exile," she claims and wants to build a hotel. She has a small son now, but "having a husband and a child isn't enough. I need to have an edge," she confesses. She's told Vincent is not happy, in fact downright lonely since his marriage to Stephanie is truly a sham. Vincent and Nicolette need each other, that's the truth. He calls her and they realize it. She invites Vincent to her villa in France, though he has a feeling Stephanie will not be joining them.
Waking up with giant hangovers, Shawnee and Tim aren't exactly sure what happened. "Who are you?" he asks. "I think I'm the daughter of a very rich man," she says. "Who are you?" she asks. "I think I'm a comedian, but I've never done anything this funny." They actually decide to "give it a try," and Shawnee disappears under the covers.
Anne-Marie innocently opens the door to find Jimmie there. Now, really! This has gone on for almost forty years! He wouldn't actually be alive, not with his lifestyle, but would he still care? She was one girl out of many. He saw her picture walking by a bookstore. Her first book was published ages ago, it took him this long? "What do you want?" she asks. "I want money, lots of money," he threatens, because she is convinced no one will believe him. But, when he threatens to tell her son about her past, she's backed into a corner.
Liliana, something approaching the Maria Callas character, arrives first in France, causing Nicolette a bit of worry, but Vincent soon arrives for a loving reunion with Nicolette and to meet his grandson. Shawnee and Tim wend their way to France, where Tim sees her real behavior, treating people like garbage, not to mention the swarms of paparazzi that follow her.
"Oooohhhhh, asparagus, it's so sensual," Liliana says orgasmically to Eric as Nicolette angrily watches. Asparagus? Really? Nicolette jumps up from the table and Vincent follows her so they can have some alone time together. He tells her he's divorcing Stephanie (damn, she was barely around). Shawnee announces her new marriage and Eric asks if she signed a pre-nup without even bothering to look at Tim. Tim and Shawnee argue, but their plot is so inane that it's not worth caring about, so Tim goes off to the beach, where Nicolette is swimming in a tiny bikini. They don't remember each other, but bond over witty remarks and shared misery, such as "I know nothing about you and you know zilch about me." Without exchanging names, Nicolette swims off with "goodbye stranger, maybe in a different life."
Everyone but Liliana is gloomy at dinner, where Tim and Nicolette are officially introduced. It's an awkward moment no one else seems to notice. Not to worry, they get a post-dinner conversation where Nicolette remembers having him fired. It clicks for him too. "Don't worry about it. I went on to bigger and better," he says. The pieces of their mutual unhappiness fall into place and Tim goes in for a smooch that he actually gets!
Mother invites estranged son to the house to tell him more. Phil isn't particularly pleasant to Anne-Marie, but she tells him "my past has finally caught up with me." She tells him about the blackmail, but without any actual details. Phil promises to have it taken care of.
In Nice, Shawnee can see Tim and Nicolette enjoying each other, but Nicolette doesn't have to worry about bolting, not once she finds him in bed with Liliana! "I'm leaving you...you're just like your daughter, only a little more polished," she says matter-of-factly, finally given her out to escape. She goes to chat with Vincent, who is packing up to leave because Phil has cabled needing help. Nicolette tells her father she and her son will be returning to Vegas (something tell Luca to get ready).
Also leaving are Shawnee and Tim. Shawnee is returning to William, but asks Tim, "how much money am I going to have to pay you?" He says he wants "not a dime." Not smart, but moral, at least.
Vincent has a plan to bring down Jimmie. No, he's not going to kill him. He's arranged for Jimmie to be in a specific alley with "a half a million dollar's worth of cocaine" and DEA agent Phil just has to show up to arrest him. I'm not sure how this plan will solve anything. Can't Jimmie tell his story in jail and blackmail everyone from the pokey? Neither father nor son knows Anne-Marie has told the other the truth, but they are courteous and Phil is appreciative. Jimmie shows up, just as expected, and when he pulls a gun, is shot dead. Now everyone is safe. "It's over," Phil tells his mother. Anne-Marie claims she "didn't want him dead," but Phil assures her it was the only way.
Tim pays Nicolette a surprise visit and the two reconnect with sexy music playing to cue their new-found love. Nicolette hasn't looked this rapturous since Grant.
Shawnee returns to LA with William and meets Luca and Leann. She has no idea what she's doing when she tells Luca that Nicolette is back in Las Vegas. Nicolette tells Vincent she's thrilled to be back in Vegas and wants to build another hotel. "What do you want to do, own the world?" he asks. "Why not?"
Luca forces Leann to go to Vegas where he kidnaps Nicolette's son. Leann leaves a message on Phil's machine telling about the kidnapping and Phil hears the message at home with Tim. Tim calls Nicolette to tell her he knows the story and to get to LA, where Luca and Leann were headed in a private plane. Phil and Tim are waiting at the airport when Luca's plane arrives. "Read him his rights and book him," Phil orders, though Luca is forced into the police car vowing to get Leann for her duplicity. "I guess it's too late for us," Leann wonders to Tim, who has Nicolette's son safely in his arms. The whole kidnapping plot too less time than Anne-Marie's drugged-up dance back in 1933. Nicolette introduces Tim to her father as "my future." Vincent sees Phil standing a few yards away and thanks him. Now they have each done favors for each other.
Vincent proudly walks Nicolette down the aisle for her third marriage. This time, it's for love, finally.
I'm sure there was a reason everyone decided it was a good idea to combine two novels into one miniseries. It gives everything a saga-like feel, but it's also disjointed. Vincent is the star for so long that when Nicolette takes over, he's reduced to the cliche of the aging mafioso. Either of their stories would have been just fine for a two-nighter. Frankly, having to drag the "Chances" characters through 40+ years to get them to fit into the "Lucky" part of the action comes off as somewhat sad as we watch the characters and their aging make-up fall into uselessness, except every now and then to finish up a plot.
However, having Collins herself do the script smooths over a lot of the roughness and this is a rare miniseries where the script triumphs over the acting. There is very little good acting anywhere (Nicolette has her moments, but has way too much to do, while Vincent isn't up to the challenge of creating a fully-loaded character--it's the guest starts like Mary Frann and Stephanie Beacham who have all the fun), but usually that means there is a terrible script undermining them. "Lucky Chances" does not have a terrible script. Yes, it's declawed and overly long, but it's not at all bad. In fact, it probably could use a bit more camp, but as I said up front, by 1990, the miniseries was starting its inevitable decline and there is an air of desperation here, as if someone decided to take a whole bunch of soap opera actors, cull their fans and steal a few nights of TV. That's harmless enough, considering some of the crap the next few years would churn out for far lesser reasons.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
ESSENTIAL TELEMOVIES: The Day After (1983)
In the period being discussed, roughly 1975-1995, the American miniseries took on some enormous topics, historical pageants and outrageous stories. But, not everything deserved a multi-episode miniseries. Some movies only needed one night and one sitting. They are what we will call "Essential Telemovies." I've used two previously ("The Woman He Love" to show off Jane Seymour and "Bella Mafia" to show off how trashy and gleeful American television could get), but there are a bunch I would like to slip into the Miniseries Marathon because they play and behave like miniseries. In fact, their shorter length probably made them classics, and some might have been completely forgotten up against miniseries powerhouses.
Few telemovies are as famous as "The Day After." What happens after the nuclear bombs go off? This movie was endlessly discussed before it aired, it was presented very uniquely and ABC followed it with a round-table panel about nuclear war. Not every child of the 80s will remember it, but my school actually recommended that parents sit down with their children and watch (and it was taught to me again in college in the early 90s as a demonstration of the world's manic obsession with nuclear war in the early 80s). There were guides to the movie. You couldn't miss the hype. Ultimately, the excitement bagged 100 million viewers! Roughly half the country watched "The Day After" on one night in November 1983. I don't know whether or not anyone learned anything profound and maybe it was just entertainment, but it's impossible to ignore it as a watershed of American television in this time period.
Of course, the world-at-large helped stir up controversy on a daily basis. Hawkish Ronald Reagan was busy denouncing the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire" and every gunshot in every foreign country seemed to have US versus USSR meaning behind it. This was before Gorbachev and his reforms; this was the era of the cranky old Soviets leaders, whose names are barely remembered in the West as they came and went so quickly. Hardliners ruled the world, from Reagan and Thatcher and their NATO allies to the scowls of their opposites in graying Communist Warsaw Pact members (whose names were never forced on us because we were taught there was no news from behind the Iron Curtain--how many Soviet leaders came between 1982 and 1985? Didn't it seem like they were constantly dying and being replaced?).
Most schools had given up on air raid drills where kids crouched under their desks, but the Emergency Broadcast System still ran those piercing tests always at the most inconvenient moments of family television time (that was just the point, but we just grumbled). The threat of nuclear war was still strong, not Cuban Missile Crisis strong, but strong enough that Reagan ordered the largest build-up of military might the world had ever seen. We were constantly being told that there were enough nuclear missiles to blow up the world many times over. The world was still scared that someone would press that button.
And though the thought of nuclear fallout was not new, there had never been one that showed what happened after the bombs went off. No one could know We had to extrapolate from what atomic bombs did to Japan and what tests showed. Three Mile Island had leaked, but Chernobyl had not. Would the world be wiped out? Would we all die slow horrible deaths from cancer? Were there underground bunkers build just for the notables?
"The Day After" aimed to answer those questions, and still wanted to entertain. This was fiction, but just barely. Nearly 30 years later, nuclear war seems almost trite. What the hell were we so worried about? Why would we start a war that would kill us all? But, that's history for you. "The Day After" certainly had the feel of a miniseries (and it was originally filmed as a two-nighter, edited down by nervous network executives to fit into just one night), it has all the hallmarks of one, but it's abbreviated run-time makes it almost scarier, more immediate. In under 2.5 hours, we would see nuclear devastation. That certainly seemed far more relevant than yet another celebration of American power masquerading as history (the colossal "Winds of War") or the giddy pleasures of Sidney Sheldon ("Rage of Angels"). "The Day After" was now. Any day could be the day after.
Paranoia seems absolutely normal to the military when the film begins. On a base in Omaha, Nebraska of all places, there is a briefing that says where all important US leaders are and then where any suspicious nuclear warhead movement might be. "Coffee, General?" he's asked after buckling himself in and sitting down after the briefing. Nothing out of the ordinary today.
I would like to also propose the movie is meant to be incredibly entertaining in a stupid way, like the disaster movies of the 70s. Big stars, big natural occurrence (usually), so many people will die if not for the vacationing vet will be able to save everyone. "Towering Inferno," all four "Airport" movies, and on and on. This actually does follow similar patterns while also being miniseries-like, all that for the people who did not want to be bothered with the main point. However, those had happy endings.
Then we get to Kansas. There is a tuneful Copeland-esque score (actually adapted from Virgil Thompson), overhead shots of farms and corn silos and peaceful suburbia, blond kids in music class, cowboys in stockyards, milk production and baseball fields. In other words, pure Americana. We've only missed ma in a gingham dress. Life is idyllic. Nothing is wrong in Kansas, except for a news report about more Soviet build-ups along Eastern European rivers, though no one is paying attention to that.
In case you missed that this is strictly the American side of things, good old Jason Robards, as squeaky clean as you can get, is on board as a doctor at a Kansas City hospital. He's a gosh darn trustworthy as President Reagan! He teaches a class and then takes a fine upstanding Asian resident on his rounds, where a perky black man tells him he just had a hospital meal of "turkey, yams, beans...nurse says she's getting me some ice cream, but she didn't come back." "What flavor you like best?" Dr. Jason asks. Yup, we get it. Hokum is here and it's not leaving. This is Middle America, everything worth saving about this great land of ours. Forget the quirky liberals, celebrities and politicians on the coasts, Dr. Jason Robards and his grinning hospital patients are what we're fighting for.
Even soldiers are smiling. A nice cultural mix (a white guy who "falls in love every weekend," a guy who reads a newspaper, a redneck and a black guy) is aboard a helicopter, a happy little microcosm, not paying attention the newspaper reader's warning that there might be trouble somewhere. Sure, there are nuclear warheads in this Eden, but no one is thinking about them. Heck, Dr. Jason's daughter is moving to Boston and even the folks who live next to the nuclear base simply wave when soldiers come and go. News is simply background noise.
When Jason comes home with flowers, an idea to go to the drive-in and "neck" with his wife Georgann Johnson, she knows something is up. Both are upset over their daughter's impending move. Just as Georgann is getting started on a rant, there is a "special report" signal on the TV. "East Germany sealed off the borders to West Berlin," the anchor reads. This is worrisome. "I just want to go upstairs and get into bed," Georgann tells Jason, "with you."
Equally unconcerned about the world around them is the family of John Cullum. Daughter Lori Lethin, days from marrying Jeff East, who wants some before the wedding, dashes upstairs in curlers to get her diaphragm, which has been snatched by sister Ellen Anthony, all while an annoying brother badly plays a clarinet. John is thoroughly annoyed by the noise interrupting his television viewing, though he does concentrate when another special report tells of more menace from the Soviets. We hear that if they don't back down by a certain hour, it will be "regarded as an act of war." The President has put the military on a "stage two alert." Mom Bibi Besch has to ref the fight between the sisters, ending the conversation with a demand that one daughter come "help with the casserole." Only John pays attention.
"God, it's 1962 all over again," Georgann says in bed. Now we've officially hit a panic button. In 1983, bringing up the Cuban Missile Crisis was a sure way to rattle the masses. She and Jason rehash the incident, but only in their own context. "I swear we made [their daughter] that night," Georgann remembers fondly. "It's not gonna happen," she chirps. "People are crazy, but not that crazy," Jason says and they go on to joke about friends that have canceled a vacation. "What if it does happen? What do we do?" she wonders at the very end of the scene.
John is puzzled, but the American flag on his lawn waving as his daughter sneaks out with her boyfriend on his motorcycle seems to placate him for the time being.
Not pleased by the turn of events is William Allen Young's wife (this was before he landed in "Sins," mind you). He's an airman who has his leave schedule disrupted. He tries to assuage her that "we just have to check things twice instead of once," but they are supposed to go to her mother's with their son. She immediately regrets her tantrum, so he goes into one. It starts off happy enough, since he'll be done with his service in "five and a half months," but he's soon snapping, "it's an alert...it's strictly by the book." Yes, we know, they fight out of fear.
The next morning, things seem very average. John and his brood (except possibly slutty Lori, who was out all night) slop the pigs, Jason kisses his wife and goes to work. Lori is getting married the next day and they are uneasy about change, but sassy sister Ellen listens in before being shooed away. "The whole world is holding its breath waiting to hear what you two are talking about," she yells at John and Lori. If only, Ellen. If only.
At the hospital, Jason and a fellow doctor wonder what will become of the world. Rumors are that Moscow has been evacuated. "Where does one go from Kansas City, the Yukon?" Jason is asked. He has no answer. No answer.
In Lawrence, Kansas, Nurse JoBeth Williams wonders who is in charge of the hospital in case an evacuation is needed. She can only find Dr. Calvin Jung, who declares, "I'm only a Resident with 150 bodies to examine, most of them unfortunately male!" He's actually examining potential military recruits, including a very young Steve Guttenberg. JoBeth goes back to work, taking Amy Madigan to maternity since she's about to have a baby. Jeff and Steve hear on campus that "the Soviets have just invaded West Germany." How will NATO respond? One student is a cynic, saying nothing will happen. "Did we help the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Afghans or the Poles? We're not going to nuke the Russians to save the Germans. I mean, if you were talking oil in Saudi Arabia, then I'd be real worried," she groans, basically summing up every one's understanding of US foreign policy throughout most of the last decade.
Some people are truly paying attention now, but no one knows quite what to do. Steve decides to visit his family in Joplin and can't get a ride with anyone, and there are streams of cars evacuating the town. His tight jeans and fit body do the trick and a man in a truck takes him, though the gun hanging over his head worries Steve a bit. Jeff goes to the barber to get his pre-wedding cut, and there John Lithgow is hogging the conversation, noting that the President's speech that night won't say much. "He'll tell us what we want to hear, keep a low sweat stain," John says, before wondering aloud just how much damage could be done. "Well, maybe they'll contain it. After all, I've still got symphony tickets for tonight," he says, as a way of placating the others. Jeff is the dopey one, still thinking Kansas is safe. "There is no 'nowhere' anymore," John schools him, especially since they are so near a military base.
Jason is in the middle of the traffic exodus when the emergency broadcast signal comes on. Frankly, in the case of an emergency, I never expected to hear a really bored young woman giving instructions, but go figure, that's just what happens. She tells everyone to go to a shelter, "while there is no immediate danger to the Kansas City area." John Cullum makes plans to fill up water jugs for the cellar and Jason waits in an interminable line for a pay phone before giving up and driving his Volvo back onto the highway. The market is a melee, with people fighting for every available item. Jeff is just trying to buy orange juice when the man in front of him announces the Russians have bombed a US ship in the Persian Gulf, but "we bombed 'em back."
Here's the con of the movie: we've already seen 45 minutes of the movie and it's just now that the military is leaping to action, juxtaposing their frantic efforts with the rather quiet planning or downright indifference around them. That's a lot of time spent on character development. Now, everything is important, but this movie only runs 2 hours and 8 minutes. Anyway, in one house, only a young boy knows the military has been deployed because his farmer father has taken mom upstairs for a quickie before lunch. John Cullum wants his wife to get everyone the basement, but Bibi whines, "can't you see how much I have to do?" "Don't you know there's almost a national emergency out there?" he asks. "It's just going to have to go on without me because your daughter is getting married and I've got 67 mouths to feed!" Ellen wonders, "there's not going to be a war, is there?"
Indeed, there is, Ellen. Indeed, there is. The General is asked for the all-important keys and the military base is a beehive of activity. But everywhere else is eerily quiet. Steve is dropped off by the bear truck driver (doing everything but waving the red hanky in his right pocket, if you know what I mean), and as he walks along the road, he sees only animals and hears nothing. Inside the base, the keys are inserted and then turned. Stock footage of a rocket going into the air is used, along with special effects that show the town rocking, the horse bucking and the missile going up and away from the hole it just left among the quiet farms. More missiles follow as everyone stops to watch them streaming up into the sky.
John Cullum tries to get his brood into the basement, but Bibi insists on making the beds until he forces her down the stairs and she howls with realization, a big King Lear-like moment. William and his mates arrive at the base too late for the detonation. No one knows who fired first, but one of them knows it doesn't matter. "Either way, we're going to get hit," he announces. They argue about what to do. William says, "the war is over" and wants to get home to his family, but others want to follow protocol. And others want to go underground into the supposedly safe bunkers. William does not go into the bunker with the rest. He's taking his chances racing back to his family.
When everyone is confused as to what the missiles are, John Lithgow knows. "They are on their way to Russia. They take about 30 minutes to reach their target," he warns everyone.
Once the air raid sounds go off, Kansas City goes into panic. Bells are going off everywhere, cars crashing, people running. It has the feel of a 70s disaster flick, with the leads constantly intersecting each other, but then a mushroom cloud overs the city. Everything stops. Clocks, cars, electricity. William runs from his car, but Jason is smart enough to stay down in his as a giant mushroom cloud and furious special effects dominate the next few minutes. Yes, a TV movie with special effects. Because no one knew exactly what would happen, they kind of assumed, so we see people being radiated down to just their bones, vaporized instantly. Stock footage of burning buildings and such help, but really it's the special effects of fire and wind that are most dazzling. For a few minutes, as we cross the halfway point of the movie, it's Armageddon. It's permanent death and destruction to any living organism. There are, of course, some inconsistencies. The lead characters never seem to be affected, no matter how close they got to anything.
In John Cullum's basement, the family members are safe from the fires and winds above them, though what they will encounter when they inevitably have to leave, no on can say. John tells his family they will have to relearn a great deal once things are sorted. "I don't know much about radiation," John says. "What's radiation?" asks Ellen. That's an important dialogue. The government, the military, they gave the American people (and one can assume the Soviets did the same), only the most basic information. So, no one really knew for sure that radiation can burn a person, what kind of cancers will arise, genetic deformities. The military people are somewhere else, so it's just going to be the salt-of-the-earth people left to figure it out. Trial and error won't be easy, but there will be survivors.
Dr. Jason feels safe enough to wander through the campus, which is covered in ash and plucky students under John Lithgow are trying to figure out what works with the planet now under a completely new law of physics. Jason Robards, who was closest to the explosion, tries to take charge of the fear and lack of knowledge, but it's too much to harness.
Steve Guttenberg is caught looking for food at John Cullum's house, but John invites him in. There will no doubt be a lot of that in the coming period, but this time it ended in a friendly way.
At the hospital, Jason and his team are forced to improvise since there is no electricity. Flashlights guide surgeries. Jason worries that they may be "the only hospital within 100 mile radius." "Too late to be a dentist," cracks Nurse JoBeth, who never met a line she couldn't deliver without heavy acid. Jason pauses to wonder what the rest of the US cities look like now.
For information's sake (and it may be true), Jason and JoBeth see a few roaches and Jason remarks that they are "impervious to radiation." "Man's legacy," he calls them, which is a bit strange because men didn't create roaches!
Frustrated at being cooped up inside the basement for five days (including the one that would have been her wedding day, Lori starts to go stir crazy. "It's only been five days and I can't remember what [Jeff] looks like!" This is just the beginning of her harangue, and it ends with her running out of the house. Dead animals and a world covered in horrid soot seem like "a beautiful day" to her, but Steve, who has generously offered to follow her as a favor to the family for letting him stay, tells her that "it only looks that way...you can't see it, you can't feel it, and you can't taste it, but it's here, right now, all around us. It's going through you like an x-ray, right into your cells! What do you think killed all these animals?" he asks, trying to get her to understand just what has happened. He is able to chase her back inside, where she finds her wedding dress.
William is still trying to get home, wherever that may be, having to join the long lines of people wandering around the streets trying to figure out where to go and what to do. They resemble an army of the dead already.
Inside the hospital, which has ballooned into every nearby building, the situation is fast becoming untenable. "Bolt the doors!" Jason tells all of the complaining underlings who rattle off the problems. He wants to treat the sick, but medications are running low, people are stealing and rats are in danger of spreading cholera. In the morgue, Dr. Calvin is asked if he's heard about the "firing squads" shooting people who commit crimes. "Without a trial? That's crazy! Go back to work," he orders!
The movie's most important exchange comes between Jason and Amy Madigan, who feels her baby has not arrived yet because "if you had a choice, would you want to be born into a world like this?" Amy lays out the political arguments, the social realities and the grimness of possibility all in a concise speech that hammers in nearly everything the movie wants to say, in a simple and concise way. "I can't argue with you," Jason replies. "Argue with me, give me a reason, tell me about hope, tell me why you work so hard in here," she begs, asking for a dialogue on why things like "hope" would still possibly matter, and he has no argument for her.
As William wanders from camp to camp with an odd little hermit he's met, Lori keeps cracking, this time thinking Jeff is in the bunker with them and planting a big kiss on him, which takes Steve by surprise since it's really him she's kissing. John Cullum starts rattling off the farm losses and Bibi says they are "lucky to be alive." "We'll see how lucky that is," he groans.
The radiation count outside goes down to levels that are considered "safe" by the doctors, so people start leaving their hovels, bells ring to announce it. That doesn't mean it doesn't choke the lungs or hurt the eyes. John Cullum goes out to survey his farm (the first thing he sees being the American flag, which has survived). He and his family go and attend a church service in a bombed out church, where the minister can barely get the words out. The family has to leave when Erin starts to bleed. Their son is also blind, so Steve volunteers to take them to Lawrence to the hospital, but promises to bring them back. Using one of the surviving horses, Steve hitches up a carriage and off they go. The blind son ask, "what do you see?" "The usual stuff," Steve says, listing a few innocuous items, but none of the dead bodies.
On the radio, the President says that "there is a cease fire" and that the Soviets have "sustained damage which is equally catastrophic." The speech is downright bizarre. It starts off somewhat comforting, but quickly escalates into gloating that "there has been no surrender, no retreat." What the hell does any of that mean under the horrible conditions into which the idiocies of nuclear war have no plunged the world. There is nothing calming about what he says, and people barely listen as they go about doing what they need to survive. "That's it, that's all he's going to say?" a student asks. He wants details of the war from John Lithgow but another student answers correctly. "What difference does it make?" John gets philosophical, quoting Einstein in saying, "he didn't know how they would fight World War III, but he knew how they would fight World War IV, with sticks and stones."
Jason finally collapses and wakes up as merely one of hundreds of patients. JoBeth is there when he wakes up, but she has to quickly run over to William, who has lost his hair and is covered with huge slabs of infected skin. His mind is barely holding on. Outside the hospital, mass graves are being readied.
But, just when it seems people might be organizing themselves a little bit, they realize it's only a facade. John Cullum attends a meeting of other farmers where they are instructed on how to plant crops and deal with soil and such, but no one understands the government mandates and none of it makes practical sense. Forlorn, John goes home to his house to find a bunch of squatters cooking animals over a fire. He tries to talk to them, but one shoots him dead. At the hospital, Jason is well enough to get up, only to find that JoBeth has died. Unwell enough to work, and looking more sickly by the hour, Jason leaves Calvin in charge and goes to find his home, seeing all of the looting, death, firing squads and horror that he's only heard about at the hospital. Calvin's special patient had been John Cullum's blind son, but he can't cure him, so Steve takes him home. Steve himself is beginning to show serious signs of decay and he wanders into his school gymnasium, which is filled with bodies, but manages to find Ellen.
With blood-curdling screams, Amy goes into labor. The rest of the patients just stare, unmoved. The baby cries, alive.
Jason makes it back to Kansas City, which is just a pile of rubble. Having finally cracked himself, he sees a few people at what used to be the site of his home and yells, "get out of my house!" As Jason cumbles to the ground, the stranger comes to hold him. Between the baby and the togetherness, there are signs of civilization.
But the movie ends with a title card: "The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert that day."
There we have it, American television when it had the power to think. A decade later, the Soviet Union was gone and world leaders were dispensing with nuclear power (not that it ceased to exist). The threat of a nuclear war became distant, almost laughable. The threat of it had been enough to keep the world balanced for 40 years. When it was no longer a real possibility, we would find warmongers using far less technologically advanced methods to keep the world in a permanent state of fear.
Can you imagine anything like "The Day After" on television by 1993? 2003? 2013? Absolutely not. No one would even attempt it, and if they did, it would be telling a far different story. It would be about the stars in it, it would be about thrilling special effects, and it would end happily. There is no happy ending to "The Day After." That's exactly the point of it. "The Day After" actually mattered. It made people think.
Few telemovies are as famous as "The Day After." What happens after the nuclear bombs go off? This movie was endlessly discussed before it aired, it was presented very uniquely and ABC followed it with a round-table panel about nuclear war. Not every child of the 80s will remember it, but my school actually recommended that parents sit down with their children and watch (and it was taught to me again in college in the early 90s as a demonstration of the world's manic obsession with nuclear war in the early 80s). There were guides to the movie. You couldn't miss the hype. Ultimately, the excitement bagged 100 million viewers! Roughly half the country watched "The Day After" on one night in November 1983. I don't know whether or not anyone learned anything profound and maybe it was just entertainment, but it's impossible to ignore it as a watershed of American television in this time period.
Of course, the world-at-large helped stir up controversy on a daily basis. Hawkish Ronald Reagan was busy denouncing the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire" and every gunshot in every foreign country seemed to have US versus USSR meaning behind it. This was before Gorbachev and his reforms; this was the era of the cranky old Soviets leaders, whose names are barely remembered in the West as they came and went so quickly. Hardliners ruled the world, from Reagan and Thatcher and their NATO allies to the scowls of their opposites in graying Communist Warsaw Pact members (whose names were never forced on us because we were taught there was no news from behind the Iron Curtain--how many Soviet leaders came between 1982 and 1985? Didn't it seem like they were constantly dying and being replaced?).
Most schools had given up on air raid drills where kids crouched under their desks, but the Emergency Broadcast System still ran those piercing tests always at the most inconvenient moments of family television time (that was just the point, but we just grumbled). The threat of nuclear war was still strong, not Cuban Missile Crisis strong, but strong enough that Reagan ordered the largest build-up of military might the world had ever seen. We were constantly being told that there were enough nuclear missiles to blow up the world many times over. The world was still scared that someone would press that button.
And though the thought of nuclear fallout was not new, there had never been one that showed what happened after the bombs went off. No one could know We had to extrapolate from what atomic bombs did to Japan and what tests showed. Three Mile Island had leaked, but Chernobyl had not. Would the world be wiped out? Would we all die slow horrible deaths from cancer? Were there underground bunkers build just for the notables?
"The Day After" aimed to answer those questions, and still wanted to entertain. This was fiction, but just barely. Nearly 30 years later, nuclear war seems almost trite. What the hell were we so worried about? Why would we start a war that would kill us all? But, that's history for you. "The Day After" certainly had the feel of a miniseries (and it was originally filmed as a two-nighter, edited down by nervous network executives to fit into just one night), it has all the hallmarks of one, but it's abbreviated run-time makes it almost scarier, more immediate. In under 2.5 hours, we would see nuclear devastation. That certainly seemed far more relevant than yet another celebration of American power masquerading as history (the colossal "Winds of War") or the giddy pleasures of Sidney Sheldon ("Rage of Angels"). "The Day After" was now. Any day could be the day after.
Paranoia seems absolutely normal to the military when the film begins. On a base in Omaha, Nebraska of all places, there is a briefing that says where all important US leaders are and then where any suspicious nuclear warhead movement might be. "Coffee, General?" he's asked after buckling himself in and sitting down after the briefing. Nothing out of the ordinary today.
I would like to also propose the movie is meant to be incredibly entertaining in a stupid way, like the disaster movies of the 70s. Big stars, big natural occurrence (usually), so many people will die if not for the vacationing vet will be able to save everyone. "Towering Inferno," all four "Airport" movies, and on and on. This actually does follow similar patterns while also being miniseries-like, all that for the people who did not want to be bothered with the main point. However, those had happy endings.
Then we get to Kansas. There is a tuneful Copeland-esque score (actually adapted from Virgil Thompson), overhead shots of farms and corn silos and peaceful suburbia, blond kids in music class, cowboys in stockyards, milk production and baseball fields. In other words, pure Americana. We've only missed ma in a gingham dress. Life is idyllic. Nothing is wrong in Kansas, except for a news report about more Soviet build-ups along Eastern European rivers, though no one is paying attention to that.
In case you missed that this is strictly the American side of things, good old Jason Robards, as squeaky clean as you can get, is on board as a doctor at a Kansas City hospital. He's a gosh darn trustworthy as President Reagan! He teaches a class and then takes a fine upstanding Asian resident on his rounds, where a perky black man tells him he just had a hospital meal of "turkey, yams, beans...nurse says she's getting me some ice cream, but she didn't come back." "What flavor you like best?" Dr. Jason asks. Yup, we get it. Hokum is here and it's not leaving. This is Middle America, everything worth saving about this great land of ours. Forget the quirky liberals, celebrities and politicians on the coasts, Dr. Jason Robards and his grinning hospital patients are what we're fighting for.
Even soldiers are smiling. A nice cultural mix (a white guy who "falls in love every weekend," a guy who reads a newspaper, a redneck and a black guy) is aboard a helicopter, a happy little microcosm, not paying attention the newspaper reader's warning that there might be trouble somewhere. Sure, there are nuclear warheads in this Eden, but no one is thinking about them. Heck, Dr. Jason's daughter is moving to Boston and even the folks who live next to the nuclear base simply wave when soldiers come and go. News is simply background noise.
When Jason comes home with flowers, an idea to go to the drive-in and "neck" with his wife Georgann Johnson, she knows something is up. Both are upset over their daughter's impending move. Just as Georgann is getting started on a rant, there is a "special report" signal on the TV. "East Germany sealed off the borders to West Berlin," the anchor reads. This is worrisome. "I just want to go upstairs and get into bed," Georgann tells Jason, "with you."
Equally unconcerned about the world around them is the family of John Cullum. Daughter Lori Lethin, days from marrying Jeff East, who wants some before the wedding, dashes upstairs in curlers to get her diaphragm, which has been snatched by sister Ellen Anthony, all while an annoying brother badly plays a clarinet. John is thoroughly annoyed by the noise interrupting his television viewing, though he does concentrate when another special report tells of more menace from the Soviets. We hear that if they don't back down by a certain hour, it will be "regarded as an act of war." The President has put the military on a "stage two alert." Mom Bibi Besch has to ref the fight between the sisters, ending the conversation with a demand that one daughter come "help with the casserole." Only John pays attention.
"God, it's 1962 all over again," Georgann says in bed. Now we've officially hit a panic button. In 1983, bringing up the Cuban Missile Crisis was a sure way to rattle the masses. She and Jason rehash the incident, but only in their own context. "I swear we made [their daughter] that night," Georgann remembers fondly. "It's not gonna happen," she chirps. "People are crazy, but not that crazy," Jason says and they go on to joke about friends that have canceled a vacation. "What if it does happen? What do we do?" she wonders at the very end of the scene.
John is puzzled, but the American flag on his lawn waving as his daughter sneaks out with her boyfriend on his motorcycle seems to placate him for the time being.
Not pleased by the turn of events is William Allen Young's wife (this was before he landed in "Sins," mind you). He's an airman who has his leave schedule disrupted. He tries to assuage her that "we just have to check things twice instead of once," but they are supposed to go to her mother's with their son. She immediately regrets her tantrum, so he goes into one. It starts off happy enough, since he'll be done with his service in "five and a half months," but he's soon snapping, "it's an alert...it's strictly by the book." Yes, we know, they fight out of fear.
The next morning, things seem very average. John and his brood (except possibly slutty Lori, who was out all night) slop the pigs, Jason kisses his wife and goes to work. Lori is getting married the next day and they are uneasy about change, but sassy sister Ellen listens in before being shooed away. "The whole world is holding its breath waiting to hear what you two are talking about," she yells at John and Lori. If only, Ellen. If only.
At the hospital, Jason and a fellow doctor wonder what will become of the world. Rumors are that Moscow has been evacuated. "Where does one go from Kansas City, the Yukon?" Jason is asked. He has no answer. No answer.
In Lawrence, Kansas, Nurse JoBeth Williams wonders who is in charge of the hospital in case an evacuation is needed. She can only find Dr. Calvin Jung, who declares, "I'm only a Resident with 150 bodies to examine, most of them unfortunately male!" He's actually examining potential military recruits, including a very young Steve Guttenberg. JoBeth goes back to work, taking Amy Madigan to maternity since she's about to have a baby. Jeff and Steve hear on campus that "the Soviets have just invaded West Germany." How will NATO respond? One student is a cynic, saying nothing will happen. "Did we help the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Afghans or the Poles? We're not going to nuke the Russians to save the Germans. I mean, if you were talking oil in Saudi Arabia, then I'd be real worried," she groans, basically summing up every one's understanding of US foreign policy throughout most of the last decade.
Some people are truly paying attention now, but no one knows quite what to do. Steve decides to visit his family in Joplin and can't get a ride with anyone, and there are streams of cars evacuating the town. His tight jeans and fit body do the trick and a man in a truck takes him, though the gun hanging over his head worries Steve a bit. Jeff goes to the barber to get his pre-wedding cut, and there John Lithgow is hogging the conversation, noting that the President's speech that night won't say much. "He'll tell us what we want to hear, keep a low sweat stain," John says, before wondering aloud just how much damage could be done. "Well, maybe they'll contain it. After all, I've still got symphony tickets for tonight," he says, as a way of placating the others. Jeff is the dopey one, still thinking Kansas is safe. "There is no 'nowhere' anymore," John schools him, especially since they are so near a military base.
Jason is in the middle of the traffic exodus when the emergency broadcast signal comes on. Frankly, in the case of an emergency, I never expected to hear a really bored young woman giving instructions, but go figure, that's just what happens. She tells everyone to go to a shelter, "while there is no immediate danger to the Kansas City area." John Cullum makes plans to fill up water jugs for the cellar and Jason waits in an interminable line for a pay phone before giving up and driving his Volvo back onto the highway. The market is a melee, with people fighting for every available item. Jeff is just trying to buy orange juice when the man in front of him announces the Russians have bombed a US ship in the Persian Gulf, but "we bombed 'em back."
Here's the con of the movie: we've already seen 45 minutes of the movie and it's just now that the military is leaping to action, juxtaposing their frantic efforts with the rather quiet planning or downright indifference around them. That's a lot of time spent on character development. Now, everything is important, but this movie only runs 2 hours and 8 minutes. Anyway, in one house, only a young boy knows the military has been deployed because his farmer father has taken mom upstairs for a quickie before lunch. John Cullum wants his wife to get everyone the basement, but Bibi whines, "can't you see how much I have to do?" "Don't you know there's almost a national emergency out there?" he asks. "It's just going to have to go on without me because your daughter is getting married and I've got 67 mouths to feed!" Ellen wonders, "there's not going to be a war, is there?"
Indeed, there is, Ellen. Indeed, there is. The General is asked for the all-important keys and the military base is a beehive of activity. But everywhere else is eerily quiet. Steve is dropped off by the bear truck driver (doing everything but waving the red hanky in his right pocket, if you know what I mean), and as he walks along the road, he sees only animals and hears nothing. Inside the base, the keys are inserted and then turned. Stock footage of a rocket going into the air is used, along with special effects that show the town rocking, the horse bucking and the missile going up and away from the hole it just left among the quiet farms. More missiles follow as everyone stops to watch them streaming up into the sky.
John Cullum tries to get his brood into the basement, but Bibi insists on making the beds until he forces her down the stairs and she howls with realization, a big King Lear-like moment. William and his mates arrive at the base too late for the detonation. No one knows who fired first, but one of them knows it doesn't matter. "Either way, we're going to get hit," he announces. They argue about what to do. William says, "the war is over" and wants to get home to his family, but others want to follow protocol. And others want to go underground into the supposedly safe bunkers. William does not go into the bunker with the rest. He's taking his chances racing back to his family.
When everyone is confused as to what the missiles are, John Lithgow knows. "They are on their way to Russia. They take about 30 minutes to reach their target," he warns everyone.
Once the air raid sounds go off, Kansas City goes into panic. Bells are going off everywhere, cars crashing, people running. It has the feel of a 70s disaster flick, with the leads constantly intersecting each other, but then a mushroom cloud overs the city. Everything stops. Clocks, cars, electricity. William runs from his car, but Jason is smart enough to stay down in his as a giant mushroom cloud and furious special effects dominate the next few minutes. Yes, a TV movie with special effects. Because no one knew exactly what would happen, they kind of assumed, so we see people being radiated down to just their bones, vaporized instantly. Stock footage of burning buildings and such help, but really it's the special effects of fire and wind that are most dazzling. For a few minutes, as we cross the halfway point of the movie, it's Armageddon. It's permanent death and destruction to any living organism. There are, of course, some inconsistencies. The lead characters never seem to be affected, no matter how close they got to anything.
In John Cullum's basement, the family members are safe from the fires and winds above them, though what they will encounter when they inevitably have to leave, no on can say. John tells his family they will have to relearn a great deal once things are sorted. "I don't know much about radiation," John says. "What's radiation?" asks Ellen. That's an important dialogue. The government, the military, they gave the American people (and one can assume the Soviets did the same), only the most basic information. So, no one really knew for sure that radiation can burn a person, what kind of cancers will arise, genetic deformities. The military people are somewhere else, so it's just going to be the salt-of-the-earth people left to figure it out. Trial and error won't be easy, but there will be survivors.
Dr. Jason feels safe enough to wander through the campus, which is covered in ash and plucky students under John Lithgow are trying to figure out what works with the planet now under a completely new law of physics. Jason Robards, who was closest to the explosion, tries to take charge of the fear and lack of knowledge, but it's too much to harness.
Steve Guttenberg is caught looking for food at John Cullum's house, but John invites him in. There will no doubt be a lot of that in the coming period, but this time it ended in a friendly way.
At the hospital, Jason and his team are forced to improvise since there is no electricity. Flashlights guide surgeries. Jason worries that they may be "the only hospital within 100 mile radius." "Too late to be a dentist," cracks Nurse JoBeth, who never met a line she couldn't deliver without heavy acid. Jason pauses to wonder what the rest of the US cities look like now.
For information's sake (and it may be true), Jason and JoBeth see a few roaches and Jason remarks that they are "impervious to radiation." "Man's legacy," he calls them, which is a bit strange because men didn't create roaches!
Frustrated at being cooped up inside the basement for five days (including the one that would have been her wedding day, Lori starts to go stir crazy. "It's only been five days and I can't remember what [Jeff] looks like!" This is just the beginning of her harangue, and it ends with her running out of the house. Dead animals and a world covered in horrid soot seem like "a beautiful day" to her, but Steve, who has generously offered to follow her as a favor to the family for letting him stay, tells her that "it only looks that way...you can't see it, you can't feel it, and you can't taste it, but it's here, right now, all around us. It's going through you like an x-ray, right into your cells! What do you think killed all these animals?" he asks, trying to get her to understand just what has happened. He is able to chase her back inside, where she finds her wedding dress.
William is still trying to get home, wherever that may be, having to join the long lines of people wandering around the streets trying to figure out where to go and what to do. They resemble an army of the dead already.
Inside the hospital, which has ballooned into every nearby building, the situation is fast becoming untenable. "Bolt the doors!" Jason tells all of the complaining underlings who rattle off the problems. He wants to treat the sick, but medications are running low, people are stealing and rats are in danger of spreading cholera. In the morgue, Dr. Calvin is asked if he's heard about the "firing squads" shooting people who commit crimes. "Without a trial? That's crazy! Go back to work," he orders!
The movie's most important exchange comes between Jason and Amy Madigan, who feels her baby has not arrived yet because "if you had a choice, would you want to be born into a world like this?" Amy lays out the political arguments, the social realities and the grimness of possibility all in a concise speech that hammers in nearly everything the movie wants to say, in a simple and concise way. "I can't argue with you," Jason replies. "Argue with me, give me a reason, tell me about hope, tell me why you work so hard in here," she begs, asking for a dialogue on why things like "hope" would still possibly matter, and he has no argument for her.
As William wanders from camp to camp with an odd little hermit he's met, Lori keeps cracking, this time thinking Jeff is in the bunker with them and planting a big kiss on him, which takes Steve by surprise since it's really him she's kissing. John Cullum starts rattling off the farm losses and Bibi says they are "lucky to be alive." "We'll see how lucky that is," he groans.
The radiation count outside goes down to levels that are considered "safe" by the doctors, so people start leaving their hovels, bells ring to announce it. That doesn't mean it doesn't choke the lungs or hurt the eyes. John Cullum goes out to survey his farm (the first thing he sees being the American flag, which has survived). He and his family go and attend a church service in a bombed out church, where the minister can barely get the words out. The family has to leave when Erin starts to bleed. Their son is also blind, so Steve volunteers to take them to Lawrence to the hospital, but promises to bring them back. Using one of the surviving horses, Steve hitches up a carriage and off they go. The blind son ask, "what do you see?" "The usual stuff," Steve says, listing a few innocuous items, but none of the dead bodies.
On the radio, the President says that "there is a cease fire" and that the Soviets have "sustained damage which is equally catastrophic." The speech is downright bizarre. It starts off somewhat comforting, but quickly escalates into gloating that "there has been no surrender, no retreat." What the hell does any of that mean under the horrible conditions into which the idiocies of nuclear war have no plunged the world. There is nothing calming about what he says, and people barely listen as they go about doing what they need to survive. "That's it, that's all he's going to say?" a student asks. He wants details of the war from John Lithgow but another student answers correctly. "What difference does it make?" John gets philosophical, quoting Einstein in saying, "he didn't know how they would fight World War III, but he knew how they would fight World War IV, with sticks and stones."
Jason finally collapses and wakes up as merely one of hundreds of patients. JoBeth is there when he wakes up, but she has to quickly run over to William, who has lost his hair and is covered with huge slabs of infected skin. His mind is barely holding on. Outside the hospital, mass graves are being readied.
But, just when it seems people might be organizing themselves a little bit, they realize it's only a facade. John Cullum attends a meeting of other farmers where they are instructed on how to plant crops and deal with soil and such, but no one understands the government mandates and none of it makes practical sense. Forlorn, John goes home to his house to find a bunch of squatters cooking animals over a fire. He tries to talk to them, but one shoots him dead. At the hospital, Jason is well enough to get up, only to find that JoBeth has died. Unwell enough to work, and looking more sickly by the hour, Jason leaves Calvin in charge and goes to find his home, seeing all of the looting, death, firing squads and horror that he's only heard about at the hospital. Calvin's special patient had been John Cullum's blind son, but he can't cure him, so Steve takes him home. Steve himself is beginning to show serious signs of decay and he wanders into his school gymnasium, which is filled with bodies, but manages to find Ellen.
With blood-curdling screams, Amy goes into labor. The rest of the patients just stare, unmoved. The baby cries, alive.
Jason makes it back to Kansas City, which is just a pile of rubble. Having finally cracked himself, he sees a few people at what used to be the site of his home and yells, "get out of my house!" As Jason cumbles to the ground, the stranger comes to hold him. Between the baby and the togetherness, there are signs of civilization.
But the movie ends with a title card: "The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert that day."
There we have it, American television when it had the power to think. A decade later, the Soviet Union was gone and world leaders were dispensing with nuclear power (not that it ceased to exist). The threat of a nuclear war became distant, almost laughable. The threat of it had been enough to keep the world balanced for 40 years. When it was no longer a real possibility, we would find warmongers using far less technologically advanced methods to keep the world in a permanent state of fear.
Can you imagine anything like "The Day After" on television by 1993? 2003? 2013? Absolutely not. No one would even attempt it, and if they did, it would be telling a far different story. It would be about the stars in it, it would be about thrilling special effects, and it would end happily. There is no happy ending to "The Day After." That's exactly the point of it. "The Day After" actually mattered. It made people think.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Queenie (1987)
Based on Michael Korda's novel, "Queenie" takes the kernel of a family member's story and fictionalizes it, though there is absolutely no reason to confuse "Queenie" with "Queen," already discussed in these pages. Maybe half-Indian/maybe not actress Merle Oberon (a relative of Korda's and the flimsy basis of the story) certainly went through nothing compared to Alex Haley's family members. Moreover, in presentation, "Queen" is serious and touching, where "Queenie" is merely witless and bland. Confusion eradicated, let's move on.
Called "Queen" by her nasty schoolmates, young Kate Emma Davies is first encountered behind the bars of an exclusive British girls school in Calcutta, 1931 (not to be confused with Merle Oberon, who was from what was then Bombay--phew, now we're fully fictionalized). One of the girls wants her locket. Spunky Kate tells her, "you'll have to rip if off my dead body!" Phew, now we have full character development.
Kate goes walking through the tiny streets of the city to meet with a friend, though the police tell her to go "back to the English quarter...don't you know your bite?" "This is my bite," she scoffs. In what has to be one of the last examples of insensitive racial casting, Kate's mother is played by Claire Bloom, donning heavily darkened make-up and a passingly developed accent, to play Indian. Kate complains that the girls at school, "know I'm part black," and refuses to return. Claire comforts her daughter with wishful thinking that Kate's father in England will someday call for them. Just as bad is Claire's brother, Leigh Lawson, who does the obligatory complaining about the British Raj, though Claire keeps smiling and saying, "England is her heritage and she shall have it."
Things at school just get worse. There's a tussle in the gym where Kate's enemy gets the locket and then teacher Geoffrey Rose, who looks and sounds like he's been mothballed in the villain closet in central casting for decades asking her "what doors are open to an Anglo-Indian woman? Not many! Your coloring allows you to pass for white." "It's not lucky, it's a curse," she responds. However, he then changes tactics and offers to make her "sound like a lady," because he hears traces of an Indian accent of her which will keep her from polite society. "How much will it cost me?" "Please, don't insult me. You and I are friends. There is no cost," he replies, dripping with menace. When he puts his hand on her cheek, he's become a most lecherous Henry Higgins knock-off.
Kate goes home and her friend dolls her up like a fashionable Indian woman, but her pleasure in a sari lasts only a moment before Claire bursts into the room, rips off her clothes and bars the friend from ever returning. Uncle Leigh takes her to the movies where she announces she "wants to be in a film." Not a movie, star, just "to be in a place where it seems to happy." This may be the first time in cinematic history anyone has yearned to be an extra. On the way back, she tells him about her English lessons and he's thrilled, but there is violence on the streets. Why? "It seems to be the way of the world, man against man, religion against religion, caste against caste," he tells her. Oh, great, Indian politics. I suppose they are inevitable here, but "Queenie" is a soap opera miniseries, let's not get too heavy, folks.
Geoffrey gets closer to what he wants by telling Kate to take off her jacket so "I can see that diaphragm move." Ewwww. He makes her do breathing exercises to watch her chest heave and then finally grabs her for a kiss. He's not even finished before telling her, "it's our little secret, you must never tell...it's your black blood that makes you so exciting!" Kate has to lie to her mother, so proud she's claiming the English side of herself, saying that "the lessons are over." Kate demonstrates and Claire chirps, "you sound just like the Queen of England." That line should have come earlier, as maybe an explanation of how she got her nickname Queenie, but it's too late because she's been called that since the first scene. Talk about inept writing!
Uncle Leigh takes Kate to a British club (he plays in the orchestra), and she easily passes for white. The boys all want to dance with her and she beams with delight. However, also at the party is her nemesis, daughter of Joss Ackland and Sarah Miles. Do you need me to describe how the scene is going to play out? You do? Well, okay, if you insist. The nemesis spots Kate and her bitchy mother says, "well, well, well, I have to take my hat off to her. You'd never know she had a touch of the you-know-what." She slithers over to Joss, tells him and Joss grabs Kate, telling her to leave. The boy she's dancing with objects, so he snaps, "you know the rules, old boy, whites only." The kid is horrified, but Joss insists that she leave with proper decorum, not making a scene.
Back to embracing her Indian side, Kate goes with her grandmother to a Hindu temple where Granny gives us a quick religious lesson. There are beautiful girls swaying about. "They are now going to express their fate through dance...they ask for love and they give love," she tells Kate. Explanations of Hindu dichotomy follow, with the takeaway from Kate being that black and white will always be fighting within her. There are dire warnings from Granny about "crossroads" and whatnot.
Leaving the temple, the two walk straight into a gigantic melee of fights, fire, shooting, carnage that goes well into the evening. The rioters overturn a car at Claire's house and fire soon erupts. Kate and Granny get home just as Claire and Leigh are exiting, but marauders kill Granny just as Leigh is strangling another.
Five years pass and Queenie is now played by Mia Sara. She and her family live in reduced surroundings. Uncle Leigh is having a fling with Sarah Miles, who had been such a gorgon about his niece being part Indian. "I don't want you for your money," he assures her when she offers him some. They almost kiss when she drops him home after a night out, but think better of it since anyone could be watching. He tries to pass off the money to Claire as payment for being in the band, but she knows it's "from the lady in the car." Apparently, Sarah is not the only woman he has. "You should get paid for your services," Claire complains, noting that he spends more time with them than his family. "I'm not your husband, I'm not our father, I won't run away," he reassures her. Yikes, men have been a problem for Claire, huh?
The nemesis has grown up into Serena Gordon, still spending time with her parents at the club, dancing to old-fashioned music. She talks about her "new stud" with her father, and the conversation is a hoot. It seems a little odd that Joss asks about his nostrils, but after all, "that's the only way to tell about a good Arab." My word! That's racist even for villains. Oh, wait, they are talking about a horse. That's two minutes we'll not get back. Joss wonders why she's not more interested in young men, and Serena coos, "why would I want anyone else when I have you, Daddy?" and he can't meet her gaze. Awkward! Sarah manages to top even this when making a toast at the club so drunk she can barely put sentences together. Joss has to drag her off the stage as everyone gossips. She gets free of his clutches and runs to Leigh. Joss follows her and finds them kissing. Breathing like a dragon, he threatens, "to destroy" Leigh, but Sarah pipes in "there will be no charges" because his personal life is no cleaner than hers and she knows it, and also because it would open up her affair with an Indian man, a big deal for a society lady.
Mia pays Joss a visit, lying to the servants that his daughter is in trouble. Joss is not pleased, telling her "nobody has to engage in bad manners," when she admits the deception. What is he, the Emily Post of Calcutta? Actually, she's there to plead for her uncle's job back. Without the money for his job, "we can't survive" and Claire has had to go begging for food. He's not moved, telling her, "you don't know what it's like having your wife touched by a nigger." Right to the head of miniseries villainy he goes with that line. He then decides Mia can be his sex toy and he won't say anything about her uncle. He takes her to the bedroom, forces her to strip. After sex, she's on the floor and he tosses her dress to her, saying, "that'll do." "This is only the beginning," he adds, insisting she come back every day "until I've had satisfaction." Mia is horrified and starts screaming, so he chases her with a belt. She crouches by the staircase and when he raises his arm, he somehow (I really didn't understand just how) falls over, dropping to the floor. A vile character like this exists in nearly every American miniseries, but it usually does take longer for him to die as the heroine finds her way to success and fortune, then finding a way to humiliate him. But, Joss is done away with very quickly. I guess we should worry that multiple servants knew Mia was in the house at the time of his death. They even see her running out with his wallet. "Go find her, I'll kill her," Serena weeps when the servants tell her a purported friend of hers pushed him over (not true, but you saw that coming before he hit the ground).
With the police searching every house, Claire decides that Mia and Leigh must go to England (now that they are 200 pounds wealthier). "Make the most of yourself," Claire tells her daughter before Mia and Leigh rush out moments before the police arrive.
It takes them two months, but Leigh and Mia arrive in London, illegally. The cab driver thinks Mia is white, which will come in handy, but refuses to take them to a decent hotel because he assumes Uncle Leigh is daring to step out with a white woman. "They call us Coloreds here," Leigh tells Mia as he is refused every job for which he applies. That means it's up to Mia to support them because she passes. How very "Imitation of Life" of her (though she doesn't hide anything with as much purpose as Sarah Jane). She has no better luck and Leigh snaps that they are down to "nothing and change," though he has enough money to get hammered every night.
In desperation, Mia goes to a seedy out-of-the-way nightclub run by Topol. "I'm Jewish, came over from Hungary," he tells her, but she claims to be English. He's not convinced, saying she has a "very exotic quality." He has no waitress jobs, but he invites her to dance on the empty stage with him. Mia reveals a hidden talent, winding around like Isidora Duncan with no props. "When it feels right, just take off your top," Topol says. Yup, it's that kind of club. She refuses, but he sizes her up, seeing that she likes attention and being adored. "As a woman, you must know what kind of power you have over a man...you can have us men utterly utterly under your spell. It must be a wonderful feeling to have all those men watching you, to know you control them," he tells her and offers her a huge sum to work for him. She doesn't turn him down or disagree with anything he's said. She even gets Uncle Leigh a job in the band.
Compared to the old cows also performing in this house of burlesque, Mia is a revelation. We did "My Fair Lady" earlier, now we're onto "Gypsy." Topol gives her good hints before her first performance and promises their relationship is "business only." She thanks him for that, but he says not to as "it gives me the opportunity to exploit you without mercy." She smiles at that, about to come out of her shell thanks to this like minded man. Leigh had no idea that he signed up for burlesque and tells Mia, "you look like an English whore." She is furious, telling him, "I'm making the most of myself, don't you see?" "Suddenly, I don't know who you are," he is forced to say, in the script's worst cliche yet.
On her first try (take that Gypsy Rose Lee), she nails it, turning out to be an absolute natural and getting the men in the joint all excited, the only stripper to do so. Soon, the club is jammed with patrons, male and female, to watch Mia do her thing. Back in Calcutta, Serena is still demanding justice for her father's death.
Time passes and Mia is still packing them in. Photographer Gary Cady finds himself smitten with her from the first time he sees her act and tries to take her picture, but Topol stops him. Leigh begs Topol to fire Mia, but she's Topol's ace and besides, she loves what she's doing. Topol wants to know where Mia is really from. She says it doesn't make a difference. Ah, not so. "It could make a rather important difference between being a stripper until your body goes or something better," he notes and she admits being from Calcutta. He gives her Gary's card, as Gary needs a model. They decide she will be called "Dawn Avalon" from Tasmania. We're back to Gypsy Rose Lee, as Mia and Topol invent a backstory for her. "Do you think you can really pull this off?" he asks. "I'll do what I have to do, for my family, for myself," she insists.
The photo session does not go well. "I can't figure out what to do with you!" Gary bleats, though still bursting with passion for her. "I have better things to with my afternoons than spend them with mad artist types who don't even know their minds!" she roars. Finally, we're getting to the cheese of the piece! She's becoming a diva. He doesn't consider himself an artist as (get ready) as a photographer, "I only reveal what's already there." "The truth," Mia adds. Finally, in a casual moment, he figures out how to shoot her.
The romance starts off very sweetly. Gary takes her to see "Camille," an odd first date movie. She wants to know how to become a movie star (remember, earlier, she had simply wanted to be in the movies, not a star). She realizes she needs an agent and someone to manage her, so she asks Topol and with a fifty-fifty split, he agrees. Gary wants Mia to move in with him, asking her in a London rain that demands a big kiss and a declaration of love. Unfortunately, drunken Uncle Leigh is not pro Gary or pro romance. The reason why isn't quite what one would expect: "I love you. I want you more than anything else in the world." It's jealousy, which works itself into an attempted rape until she grabs a shattered bottle. Creepy, yes, but this is the first unique moment in "Queenie," so far a paint-by-numbers story with a cliche at every turn.
Mia rushes out of the apartment and Leigh follows, only to be hit by a car and killed. She lies in a letter to her mother, telling her "he died peacefully." Free of Leigh, she goes back to Gary, who is angry at her for disappearing from him life, but when she tells him Leigh was killed, he's back to being nice. Now she's ready to move in, and they can have a big sex scene, completely with special lighting, limbs flailing, bad kissing and the rest of the works.
Gary has a showing of his work, where snobs talk about the "existential" pictures and his use of "darks and lights," no pun intended. This gets them an invitation to one of the "famous weekends" of movie producer Kirk Douglas. Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom were slumming, of course, but Kirk Douglas does it with a capital S. He "collects people like he collects art," Gary says as Mia is astounded by all the people at the mansion.
Kirk's agent, Joel Grey (the only Oscar-winning slummer here, as Kirk would not get his honorary Oscar until almost a decade after "Queenie"), is worried because Kirk wants to make the leap from producer to director. "I've directed before," Kirk says, grabbing a statuette from the desk, but Joel reminds him the new picture is a big budget one and needs an experienced hand. "You're an artist, not a traffic cop," Joel carps, but Kirk wants "the challenge."
You want cloying? Here it is. Mia is mingling, managing to bump into everyone and backs up into Gary, who sends a punch bowl hurling at Kirk. "I don't believe we've met," he says with a good sense of humor to Mia and Gary. "I'm a dancer," she tells him. "Classical?" "No, Modern." Kirk seems to think she would be a good actress and offers her a screen test. "You're not ready!" Gary pouts, though Topol is on Mia's side. Apparently, Topol and Kirk worked together, "a long time ago, making silent films." Boy, that's convenient.
Before the screen tests of various ladies, Joel reminds Kirk how nervous he is, and how investors and studios want established actors, "preferably with a few wrinkles." Kirk says the leading man is nearing 50. Joel is shocked he's that old. "Time flies when you're overacting," Kirk comments. That's a good line, no matter what, but in a miniseries, particularly apt since overacting is usually the only kind of acting that goes on. He's way more interested in Mia than he should be. "Remember, all these people are here to make you look good," he says to calm her nerves. At a screen test?
Gary has come for moral support, and Kirk asks him for help redoing the lighting to maximize Mia's features. Now we're sprinted into territory claimed by "The Red Shoes." After one flubbed take, her second stab is perfection, well, in the plot at least. "That one's a star!" Kirk beams to Joel. Actually, the only thing that even bears a resemblance to movie stars of the 1930s is the make-up.
Kirk has to haggle with Topol for Mia's services and Topol is shrewd. The negotiations over a pool table are intense, with Topol taking full advantage of their "shared past" as peasants. Kirk asks, "how does she feel about needles"" to Topol's surprise. The movie is to be shot...wait for it...wait for it...in India! And one needs her shots to travel to India. Uh oh. Worlds are about to collide.
Topol doesn't know about the murder charge hanging over Mia's head, so he can't understand why she refuses to go back to India. He think it's just about the passing, so he tells her, "keep passing...if we don't tell anyone, no one will ever know, in India or anywhere else." She decides to tell Topol all of the truth, but he reminds her she's "Dawn Avalon" from Tasmania, with "papers forged by the greatest artists in Europe."
There's another problem: Gary won't go to India with her because he's been offered a photography assignment elsewhere. "I need you," she whines and of course he gives in.
Before everyone arrives, Serena has yet another scene demanding justice, though her mother advises her to drop the investigation because she's "not prepared" for the truth about "Dear Daddy."
A huge publicity machine is rolled out when the party touches down in India. Hollywood wasn't too keen on location filming in the 1930s, but this bit of trumped-up hokum was a specialty. Gigantic crowds are there to welcome everyone as the leads are sent up on elephants in front of the cheering masses. They get a more spectacular welcome than any visiting royal could imagine.
Joel breaks the news to Mia and Gary that they can't stay in the same room because "the Indian government is really fussy about these things." Uh huh. After the display we just saw, they couldn't also arrange for two people to sleep together? They can only manage big magic tricks?
It's two days before Claire sees a newspaper about Mia's presence in India. She calls Mia and they meet in a park. "Why have you come?" Mia asks Claire. "If anyone sees us together, finds out who I really am..." she worries, but unfortunately Claire has been evicted and has nowhere to go. Mia gives her the hotel key and insists she speak to no one. However, someone has been trailing Claire, hired by whoever it was who paid more rent on Claire's hovel to get her forced out.
Just as rehearsals are about to begin, Kirk has problems of his own. A major investor has pulled out and everyone insists Kirk cut down expenses. "I'll find the money," he insists, refusing to change the picture he wants to make.
It's uh oh time. Gary goes to deliver champagne to Mia's room where Mama Claire is hiding out fondling the fabrics of her daughter's dresses. Luckily, Claire stalls and Mia is only moments behind. Claire pretends to be Mia's maid, saving the day. Her acting is better than everyone else's, maybe she should be in the movie! We're back to "Imitation of Life." Mia wants to send Claire to England so her cover won't be blown and because she thinks it's "shameful" to treat her mother like a servant. Claire launches into a speech about "shame" done very nicely (if a little influenced by tranquilizers), but since Mia is not her acting equal, the scene doesn't quite have the crackle it should.
Mia and Kirk go horse riding, which Kirk claims "is done from the thighs." Mia's horse is spooked when none other than Serena rides by. Mia is hidden behind a mesh netting. "I say, you look familiar," Serena says, and Mia is too freaked to continue the riding lesson. She's convinced Serena recognized her. Claire's advice is "act like nobody can touch you and nobody can."
Indeed, Serena has recognized Mia and goes to the police. The man who has been running the investigation all these years doesn't believe her. Serena knows it's her, "living the high life and making fools of us all." The detective is too afraid to rile the English, saying that without proof, it will be embarrassing. Serena throws money at him and demands he do something about Mia.
At a party, Kirk suggests Gary should be in the movies and Mia tells him to "get him a job" but Gary doesn't want it and an argument ensues. Mia huffs off and Kirk chases after her. "Let's make up," he suggests when he catches up to her and plants a kiss on her lips. The unfortunately lighting makes him look like a wax figure old enough to be her grandfather (which I guess he is). She dashes away, but then gets drunk and sloppy. Gary insists he be the one to take her to her room and Kirk is jealous, instructing Joel to make sure the movie shooting in Egypt hires Gary.
The next day, Mia tries to apologize to hardened Gary, who informs her of the job offer in Egypt. She keeps telling Gary she has no interest in Kirk, so Gary proposes. "You're changing all the time. You're all shadows and smoke. I am finding it harder and harder to hold onto you," he exclaims when she doesn't accept.
Serena pounces on Mia, telling her she's left a photograph for her at the front desk of a girl she went to school with who looks just like her. "You could be twins," she gloats while Mia tries to remain calm. Badness piles up because Gary takes the job in Egypt. Has she thought to call Topol? Isn't it his job to protect her? Gary accuses her of not loving him, the reason she keeps some big secret from him. They promise to write each other every day, share a kiss and then he departs.
There is a gigantic battle to remind us of the political unrest in India...oh, wait, never mind, it's part of Kirk's movie, because why else would Mia be riding into the middle of it? When it's over, Mia goes to Joel hoping for mail, but he's hidden the letters from Gary to give to Kirk. He's been keeping both sides of the correspondence.
The police inspector arrives to question Mia about Serena's accusation. He has contacted her supposed hometown in Tasmania, where no one has ever heard of her. She whips out the forged papers, pictures and everything else. "Really, Inspector, your case is beginning to sound like one of my movies, my bad ones," Kirk jokes with him, defending his star. When the inspector leaves, Kirk turns on Mia, demanding to know "what the hell is going on?" He can tell he's lying. "How do you think I got out of Budapest? Same way you crawled out of Calcutta," he notes. She does not tell him the truth, but she does crumble into his arms for a passionate kiss.
The inspector did not believe the papers, but Serena has taken the case to the British authorities anyway, and he's relieved of his duties in the investigation.
Financially, Kirk is still in trouble. Joel has been sending his wife out to beg for money. Kirk is aghast that he would do something so tacky. "Why don't we hold a bake sale?" he cracks. But, Joel's wife has connections. After all, she is the daughter of a studio head (which makes her basically Irene Mayer Selznick). However, they need $4 million more in order to finish the movie and no one is putting it up. "You're not listening to me. Maybe if you took your mind off that little tart..." Joel advises, which gets him a back-handed slap across the face from tough Kirk. "You're the parody of a general, marching off to battle while everyone is telling you you're going to lose," Joel huffs. What the hell does that mean?
Claire is upset that Mia is sleeping with Kirk. "He's only using you," she notes, but Mia says she's doing the same with him because "he's the only one who can help us." In fact, she's told him the full truth, which worries her mother. Claire also was hoping that Mia would be in love with the man she's screwing, and Mia ruefully admits that she had love and lost it.
Bouncing into the movie three-quarters of the way is the always-dependable Martin Balsam, as a powerful Hollywood player. He has seen the rushes and agrees that Mia is definitely a star. But, it's down to business. Martin hasn't an arrangement in mind. He's already seen the financial books, "both sets," which horrifies Kirk. His demands for pumping money into the movie are gigantic: distribution, equal billing and half the profits. "Half the profits for one quarter of the investment?" Kirk asks. But, he agrees to it and then Martin asks for the last condition, final say in editing. Kirk scowls, "you're garbage!" "Does that mean we have a deal?" Martin asks. Kirk stomps off with Joel complaining and nearly collapses from a heart condition. "Make the deal...but no final cut!" he tells Joel.
The movie is done and Kirk and Mia are back in London. During a night walk along the Thames, he gives her the letters from Gary. He fully admits to stashing them. "You bastard," she cries. "I am," he agrees. He did it because "I don't want to lose you," he tells her. He goes one step further and says he sent her letters to Gary to him since "I knew I couldn't keep you forever." He's a bastard, but a noble one, apparently. She takes the car to get to Gary as quickly as possible and of course Kirk's chest pains mirror those on his face. He sits on a bench and is still there in the morning, dead. That makes for a nice newspaper picture.
Naturally, Mia is distraught (and Claire is still pretending to be her maid, even back in London), but Gary arrives, having received the letters. "Post office is slow," she jokes. "I've been married and widowed," she tells him, which is news to anyone watching. Did I miss a wedding scene? "We're both very different people now," Gary notes, a line expected since the beginning of the scene. The conversation gets even dumber when she turns on him, opining that he's come back for her money, angry that he wasn't there for her when she was afraid. That's unfair, but remember, he knows they are "different people," so he doesn't have a problem walking out on her.
All of this happened and Mia's first movie hasn't even opened yet, because after a series of flashbacks, Mia and Claire drive up to the premiere, mobbed by press and fans in grand old Hollywood style. Even Topol is there and we haven't seen him since he made the deal with Kirk. Joel tells the crowed they are about to see "the most lavish and probably the most expensive film ever made." There's a shout-out to Kirk and then he introduces Mia. When Mia steps to the microphone, she gives one of those bashful, quiet and very rehearsed speeches that actresses once gave at premieres. Okay, since this is a movie about a movie, it goes on longer than say Vivien Leigh or Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Fontaine might have deemed appropriate, but that's to be expected. Mia outs her mother, who hesitantly moves through the throngs to join her daughter on the steps of the theater. Nobody seems at all upset, which kind of negatives the whole plot, doesn't it? "I'm very proud of where I came from and who I am," Mia says. Gary starts clapping and soon everyone joins in. Boy, when Hollywood decides to absolve itself of its sins, it goes all out, doesn't it? Merle Oberon died in 1979, so she didn't get to see this vindication, but then again, no one really knows her exact story. This one is pure Hollywood fantasy tripe.
Called "Queen" by her nasty schoolmates, young Kate Emma Davies is first encountered behind the bars of an exclusive British girls school in Calcutta, 1931 (not to be confused with Merle Oberon, who was from what was then Bombay--phew, now we're fully fictionalized). One of the girls wants her locket. Spunky Kate tells her, "you'll have to rip if off my dead body!" Phew, now we have full character development.
Kate goes walking through the tiny streets of the city to meet with a friend, though the police tell her to go "back to the English quarter...don't you know your bite?" "This is my bite," she scoffs. In what has to be one of the last examples of insensitive racial casting, Kate's mother is played by Claire Bloom, donning heavily darkened make-up and a passingly developed accent, to play Indian. Kate complains that the girls at school, "know I'm part black," and refuses to return. Claire comforts her daughter with wishful thinking that Kate's father in England will someday call for them. Just as bad is Claire's brother, Leigh Lawson, who does the obligatory complaining about the British Raj, though Claire keeps smiling and saying, "England is her heritage and she shall have it."
Things at school just get worse. There's a tussle in the gym where Kate's enemy gets the locket and then teacher Geoffrey Rose, who looks and sounds like he's been mothballed in the villain closet in central casting for decades asking her "what doors are open to an Anglo-Indian woman? Not many! Your coloring allows you to pass for white." "It's not lucky, it's a curse," she responds. However, he then changes tactics and offers to make her "sound like a lady," because he hears traces of an Indian accent of her which will keep her from polite society. "How much will it cost me?" "Please, don't insult me. You and I are friends. There is no cost," he replies, dripping with menace. When he puts his hand on her cheek, he's become a most lecherous Henry Higgins knock-off.
Kate goes home and her friend dolls her up like a fashionable Indian woman, but her pleasure in a sari lasts only a moment before Claire bursts into the room, rips off her clothes and bars the friend from ever returning. Uncle Leigh takes her to the movies where she announces she "wants to be in a film." Not a movie, star, just "to be in a place where it seems to happy." This may be the first time in cinematic history anyone has yearned to be an extra. On the way back, she tells him about her English lessons and he's thrilled, but there is violence on the streets. Why? "It seems to be the way of the world, man against man, religion against religion, caste against caste," he tells her. Oh, great, Indian politics. I suppose they are inevitable here, but "Queenie" is a soap opera miniseries, let's not get too heavy, folks.
Geoffrey gets closer to what he wants by telling Kate to take off her jacket so "I can see that diaphragm move." Ewwww. He makes her do breathing exercises to watch her chest heave and then finally grabs her for a kiss. He's not even finished before telling her, "it's our little secret, you must never tell...it's your black blood that makes you so exciting!" Kate has to lie to her mother, so proud she's claiming the English side of herself, saying that "the lessons are over." Kate demonstrates and Claire chirps, "you sound just like the Queen of England." That line should have come earlier, as maybe an explanation of how she got her nickname Queenie, but it's too late because she's been called that since the first scene. Talk about inept writing!
Uncle Leigh takes Kate to a British club (he plays in the orchestra), and she easily passes for white. The boys all want to dance with her and she beams with delight. However, also at the party is her nemesis, daughter of Joss Ackland and Sarah Miles. Do you need me to describe how the scene is going to play out? You do? Well, okay, if you insist. The nemesis spots Kate and her bitchy mother says, "well, well, well, I have to take my hat off to her. You'd never know she had a touch of the you-know-what." She slithers over to Joss, tells him and Joss grabs Kate, telling her to leave. The boy she's dancing with objects, so he snaps, "you know the rules, old boy, whites only." The kid is horrified, but Joss insists that she leave with proper decorum, not making a scene.
Back to embracing her Indian side, Kate goes with her grandmother to a Hindu temple where Granny gives us a quick religious lesson. There are beautiful girls swaying about. "They are now going to express their fate through dance...they ask for love and they give love," she tells Kate. Explanations of Hindu dichotomy follow, with the takeaway from Kate being that black and white will always be fighting within her. There are dire warnings from Granny about "crossroads" and whatnot.
Leaving the temple, the two walk straight into a gigantic melee of fights, fire, shooting, carnage that goes well into the evening. The rioters overturn a car at Claire's house and fire soon erupts. Kate and Granny get home just as Claire and Leigh are exiting, but marauders kill Granny just as Leigh is strangling another.
Five years pass and Queenie is now played by Mia Sara. She and her family live in reduced surroundings. Uncle Leigh is having a fling with Sarah Miles, who had been such a gorgon about his niece being part Indian. "I don't want you for your money," he assures her when she offers him some. They almost kiss when she drops him home after a night out, but think better of it since anyone could be watching. He tries to pass off the money to Claire as payment for being in the band, but she knows it's "from the lady in the car." Apparently, Sarah is not the only woman he has. "You should get paid for your services," Claire complains, noting that he spends more time with them than his family. "I'm not your husband, I'm not our father, I won't run away," he reassures her. Yikes, men have been a problem for Claire, huh?
The nemesis has grown up into Serena Gordon, still spending time with her parents at the club, dancing to old-fashioned music. She talks about her "new stud" with her father, and the conversation is a hoot. It seems a little odd that Joss asks about his nostrils, but after all, "that's the only way to tell about a good Arab." My word! That's racist even for villains. Oh, wait, they are talking about a horse. That's two minutes we'll not get back. Joss wonders why she's not more interested in young men, and Serena coos, "why would I want anyone else when I have you, Daddy?" and he can't meet her gaze. Awkward! Sarah manages to top even this when making a toast at the club so drunk she can barely put sentences together. Joss has to drag her off the stage as everyone gossips. She gets free of his clutches and runs to Leigh. Joss follows her and finds them kissing. Breathing like a dragon, he threatens, "to destroy" Leigh, but Sarah pipes in "there will be no charges" because his personal life is no cleaner than hers and she knows it, and also because it would open up her affair with an Indian man, a big deal for a society lady.
Mia pays Joss a visit, lying to the servants that his daughter is in trouble. Joss is not pleased, telling her "nobody has to engage in bad manners," when she admits the deception. What is he, the Emily Post of Calcutta? Actually, she's there to plead for her uncle's job back. Without the money for his job, "we can't survive" and Claire has had to go begging for food. He's not moved, telling her, "you don't know what it's like having your wife touched by a nigger." Right to the head of miniseries villainy he goes with that line. He then decides Mia can be his sex toy and he won't say anything about her uncle. He takes her to the bedroom, forces her to strip. After sex, she's on the floor and he tosses her dress to her, saying, "that'll do." "This is only the beginning," he adds, insisting she come back every day "until I've had satisfaction." Mia is horrified and starts screaming, so he chases her with a belt. She crouches by the staircase and when he raises his arm, he somehow (I really didn't understand just how) falls over, dropping to the floor. A vile character like this exists in nearly every American miniseries, but it usually does take longer for him to die as the heroine finds her way to success and fortune, then finding a way to humiliate him. But, Joss is done away with very quickly. I guess we should worry that multiple servants knew Mia was in the house at the time of his death. They even see her running out with his wallet. "Go find her, I'll kill her," Serena weeps when the servants tell her a purported friend of hers pushed him over (not true, but you saw that coming before he hit the ground).
With the police searching every house, Claire decides that Mia and Leigh must go to England (now that they are 200 pounds wealthier). "Make the most of yourself," Claire tells her daughter before Mia and Leigh rush out moments before the police arrive.
It takes them two months, but Leigh and Mia arrive in London, illegally. The cab driver thinks Mia is white, which will come in handy, but refuses to take them to a decent hotel because he assumes Uncle Leigh is daring to step out with a white woman. "They call us Coloreds here," Leigh tells Mia as he is refused every job for which he applies. That means it's up to Mia to support them because she passes. How very "Imitation of Life" of her (though she doesn't hide anything with as much purpose as Sarah Jane). She has no better luck and Leigh snaps that they are down to "nothing and change," though he has enough money to get hammered every night.
In desperation, Mia goes to a seedy out-of-the-way nightclub run by Topol. "I'm Jewish, came over from Hungary," he tells her, but she claims to be English. He's not convinced, saying she has a "very exotic quality." He has no waitress jobs, but he invites her to dance on the empty stage with him. Mia reveals a hidden talent, winding around like Isidora Duncan with no props. "When it feels right, just take off your top," Topol says. Yup, it's that kind of club. She refuses, but he sizes her up, seeing that she likes attention and being adored. "As a woman, you must know what kind of power you have over a man...you can have us men utterly utterly under your spell. It must be a wonderful feeling to have all those men watching you, to know you control them," he tells her and offers her a huge sum to work for him. She doesn't turn him down or disagree with anything he's said. She even gets Uncle Leigh a job in the band.
Compared to the old cows also performing in this house of burlesque, Mia is a revelation. We did "My Fair Lady" earlier, now we're onto "Gypsy." Topol gives her good hints before her first performance and promises their relationship is "business only." She thanks him for that, but he says not to as "it gives me the opportunity to exploit you without mercy." She smiles at that, about to come out of her shell thanks to this like minded man. Leigh had no idea that he signed up for burlesque and tells Mia, "you look like an English whore." She is furious, telling him, "I'm making the most of myself, don't you see?" "Suddenly, I don't know who you are," he is forced to say, in the script's worst cliche yet.
On her first try (take that Gypsy Rose Lee), she nails it, turning out to be an absolute natural and getting the men in the joint all excited, the only stripper to do so. Soon, the club is jammed with patrons, male and female, to watch Mia do her thing. Back in Calcutta, Serena is still demanding justice for her father's death.
Time passes and Mia is still packing them in. Photographer Gary Cady finds himself smitten with her from the first time he sees her act and tries to take her picture, but Topol stops him. Leigh begs Topol to fire Mia, but she's Topol's ace and besides, she loves what she's doing. Topol wants to know where Mia is really from. She says it doesn't make a difference. Ah, not so. "It could make a rather important difference between being a stripper until your body goes or something better," he notes and she admits being from Calcutta. He gives her Gary's card, as Gary needs a model. They decide she will be called "Dawn Avalon" from Tasmania. We're back to Gypsy Rose Lee, as Mia and Topol invent a backstory for her. "Do you think you can really pull this off?" he asks. "I'll do what I have to do, for my family, for myself," she insists.
The photo session does not go well. "I can't figure out what to do with you!" Gary bleats, though still bursting with passion for her. "I have better things to with my afternoons than spend them with mad artist types who don't even know their minds!" she roars. Finally, we're getting to the cheese of the piece! She's becoming a diva. He doesn't consider himself an artist as (get ready) as a photographer, "I only reveal what's already there." "The truth," Mia adds. Finally, in a casual moment, he figures out how to shoot her.
The romance starts off very sweetly. Gary takes her to see "Camille," an odd first date movie. She wants to know how to become a movie star (remember, earlier, she had simply wanted to be in the movies, not a star). She realizes she needs an agent and someone to manage her, so she asks Topol and with a fifty-fifty split, he agrees. Gary wants Mia to move in with him, asking her in a London rain that demands a big kiss and a declaration of love. Unfortunately, drunken Uncle Leigh is not pro Gary or pro romance. The reason why isn't quite what one would expect: "I love you. I want you more than anything else in the world." It's jealousy, which works itself into an attempted rape until she grabs a shattered bottle. Creepy, yes, but this is the first unique moment in "Queenie," so far a paint-by-numbers story with a cliche at every turn.
Mia rushes out of the apartment and Leigh follows, only to be hit by a car and killed. She lies in a letter to her mother, telling her "he died peacefully." Free of Leigh, she goes back to Gary, who is angry at her for disappearing from him life, but when she tells him Leigh was killed, he's back to being nice. Now she's ready to move in, and they can have a big sex scene, completely with special lighting, limbs flailing, bad kissing and the rest of the works.
Gary has a showing of his work, where snobs talk about the "existential" pictures and his use of "darks and lights," no pun intended. This gets them an invitation to one of the "famous weekends" of movie producer Kirk Douglas. Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom were slumming, of course, but Kirk Douglas does it with a capital S. He "collects people like he collects art," Gary says as Mia is astounded by all the people at the mansion.
Kirk's agent, Joel Grey (the only Oscar-winning slummer here, as Kirk would not get his honorary Oscar until almost a decade after "Queenie"), is worried because Kirk wants to make the leap from producer to director. "I've directed before," Kirk says, grabbing a statuette from the desk, but Joel reminds him the new picture is a big budget one and needs an experienced hand. "You're an artist, not a traffic cop," Joel carps, but Kirk wants "the challenge."
You want cloying? Here it is. Mia is mingling, managing to bump into everyone and backs up into Gary, who sends a punch bowl hurling at Kirk. "I don't believe we've met," he says with a good sense of humor to Mia and Gary. "I'm a dancer," she tells him. "Classical?" "No, Modern." Kirk seems to think she would be a good actress and offers her a screen test. "You're not ready!" Gary pouts, though Topol is on Mia's side. Apparently, Topol and Kirk worked together, "a long time ago, making silent films." Boy, that's convenient.
Before the screen tests of various ladies, Joel reminds Kirk how nervous he is, and how investors and studios want established actors, "preferably with a few wrinkles." Kirk says the leading man is nearing 50. Joel is shocked he's that old. "Time flies when you're overacting," Kirk comments. That's a good line, no matter what, but in a miniseries, particularly apt since overacting is usually the only kind of acting that goes on. He's way more interested in Mia than he should be. "Remember, all these people are here to make you look good," he says to calm her nerves. At a screen test?
Gary has come for moral support, and Kirk asks him for help redoing the lighting to maximize Mia's features. Now we're sprinted into territory claimed by "The Red Shoes." After one flubbed take, her second stab is perfection, well, in the plot at least. "That one's a star!" Kirk beams to Joel. Actually, the only thing that even bears a resemblance to movie stars of the 1930s is the make-up.
Kirk has to haggle with Topol for Mia's services and Topol is shrewd. The negotiations over a pool table are intense, with Topol taking full advantage of their "shared past" as peasants. Kirk asks, "how does she feel about needles"" to Topol's surprise. The movie is to be shot...wait for it...wait for it...in India! And one needs her shots to travel to India. Uh oh. Worlds are about to collide.
Topol doesn't know about the murder charge hanging over Mia's head, so he can't understand why she refuses to go back to India. He think it's just about the passing, so he tells her, "keep passing...if we don't tell anyone, no one will ever know, in India or anywhere else." She decides to tell Topol all of the truth, but he reminds her she's "Dawn Avalon" from Tasmania, with "papers forged by the greatest artists in Europe."
There's another problem: Gary won't go to India with her because he's been offered a photography assignment elsewhere. "I need you," she whines and of course he gives in.
Before everyone arrives, Serena has yet another scene demanding justice, though her mother advises her to drop the investigation because she's "not prepared" for the truth about "Dear Daddy."
A huge publicity machine is rolled out when the party touches down in India. Hollywood wasn't too keen on location filming in the 1930s, but this bit of trumped-up hokum was a specialty. Gigantic crowds are there to welcome everyone as the leads are sent up on elephants in front of the cheering masses. They get a more spectacular welcome than any visiting royal could imagine.
Joel breaks the news to Mia and Gary that they can't stay in the same room because "the Indian government is really fussy about these things." Uh huh. After the display we just saw, they couldn't also arrange for two people to sleep together? They can only manage big magic tricks?
It's two days before Claire sees a newspaper about Mia's presence in India. She calls Mia and they meet in a park. "Why have you come?" Mia asks Claire. "If anyone sees us together, finds out who I really am..." she worries, but unfortunately Claire has been evicted and has nowhere to go. Mia gives her the hotel key and insists she speak to no one. However, someone has been trailing Claire, hired by whoever it was who paid more rent on Claire's hovel to get her forced out.
Just as rehearsals are about to begin, Kirk has problems of his own. A major investor has pulled out and everyone insists Kirk cut down expenses. "I'll find the money," he insists, refusing to change the picture he wants to make.
It's uh oh time. Gary goes to deliver champagne to Mia's room where Mama Claire is hiding out fondling the fabrics of her daughter's dresses. Luckily, Claire stalls and Mia is only moments behind. Claire pretends to be Mia's maid, saving the day. Her acting is better than everyone else's, maybe she should be in the movie! We're back to "Imitation of Life." Mia wants to send Claire to England so her cover won't be blown and because she thinks it's "shameful" to treat her mother like a servant. Claire launches into a speech about "shame" done very nicely (if a little influenced by tranquilizers), but since Mia is not her acting equal, the scene doesn't quite have the crackle it should.
Mia and Kirk go horse riding, which Kirk claims "is done from the thighs." Mia's horse is spooked when none other than Serena rides by. Mia is hidden behind a mesh netting. "I say, you look familiar," Serena says, and Mia is too freaked to continue the riding lesson. She's convinced Serena recognized her. Claire's advice is "act like nobody can touch you and nobody can."
Indeed, Serena has recognized Mia and goes to the police. The man who has been running the investigation all these years doesn't believe her. Serena knows it's her, "living the high life and making fools of us all." The detective is too afraid to rile the English, saying that without proof, it will be embarrassing. Serena throws money at him and demands he do something about Mia.
At a party, Kirk suggests Gary should be in the movies and Mia tells him to "get him a job" but Gary doesn't want it and an argument ensues. Mia huffs off and Kirk chases after her. "Let's make up," he suggests when he catches up to her and plants a kiss on her lips. The unfortunately lighting makes him look like a wax figure old enough to be her grandfather (which I guess he is). She dashes away, but then gets drunk and sloppy. Gary insists he be the one to take her to her room and Kirk is jealous, instructing Joel to make sure the movie shooting in Egypt hires Gary.
The next day, Mia tries to apologize to hardened Gary, who informs her of the job offer in Egypt. She keeps telling Gary she has no interest in Kirk, so Gary proposes. "You're changing all the time. You're all shadows and smoke. I am finding it harder and harder to hold onto you," he exclaims when she doesn't accept.
Serena pounces on Mia, telling her she's left a photograph for her at the front desk of a girl she went to school with who looks just like her. "You could be twins," she gloats while Mia tries to remain calm. Badness piles up because Gary takes the job in Egypt. Has she thought to call Topol? Isn't it his job to protect her? Gary accuses her of not loving him, the reason she keeps some big secret from him. They promise to write each other every day, share a kiss and then he departs.
There is a gigantic battle to remind us of the political unrest in India...oh, wait, never mind, it's part of Kirk's movie, because why else would Mia be riding into the middle of it? When it's over, Mia goes to Joel hoping for mail, but he's hidden the letters from Gary to give to Kirk. He's been keeping both sides of the correspondence.
The police inspector arrives to question Mia about Serena's accusation. He has contacted her supposed hometown in Tasmania, where no one has ever heard of her. She whips out the forged papers, pictures and everything else. "Really, Inspector, your case is beginning to sound like one of my movies, my bad ones," Kirk jokes with him, defending his star. When the inspector leaves, Kirk turns on Mia, demanding to know "what the hell is going on?" He can tell he's lying. "How do you think I got out of Budapest? Same way you crawled out of Calcutta," he notes. She does not tell him the truth, but she does crumble into his arms for a passionate kiss.
The inspector did not believe the papers, but Serena has taken the case to the British authorities anyway, and he's relieved of his duties in the investigation.
Financially, Kirk is still in trouble. Joel has been sending his wife out to beg for money. Kirk is aghast that he would do something so tacky. "Why don't we hold a bake sale?" he cracks. But, Joel's wife has connections. After all, she is the daughter of a studio head (which makes her basically Irene Mayer Selznick). However, they need $4 million more in order to finish the movie and no one is putting it up. "You're not listening to me. Maybe if you took your mind off that little tart..." Joel advises, which gets him a back-handed slap across the face from tough Kirk. "You're the parody of a general, marching off to battle while everyone is telling you you're going to lose," Joel huffs. What the hell does that mean?
Claire is upset that Mia is sleeping with Kirk. "He's only using you," she notes, but Mia says she's doing the same with him because "he's the only one who can help us." In fact, she's told him the full truth, which worries her mother. Claire also was hoping that Mia would be in love with the man she's screwing, and Mia ruefully admits that she had love and lost it.
Bouncing into the movie three-quarters of the way is the always-dependable Martin Balsam, as a powerful Hollywood player. He has seen the rushes and agrees that Mia is definitely a star. But, it's down to business. Martin hasn't an arrangement in mind. He's already seen the financial books, "both sets," which horrifies Kirk. His demands for pumping money into the movie are gigantic: distribution, equal billing and half the profits. "Half the profits for one quarter of the investment?" Kirk asks. But, he agrees to it and then Martin asks for the last condition, final say in editing. Kirk scowls, "you're garbage!" "Does that mean we have a deal?" Martin asks. Kirk stomps off with Joel complaining and nearly collapses from a heart condition. "Make the deal...but no final cut!" he tells Joel.
The movie is done and Kirk and Mia are back in London. During a night walk along the Thames, he gives her the letters from Gary. He fully admits to stashing them. "You bastard," she cries. "I am," he agrees. He did it because "I don't want to lose you," he tells her. He goes one step further and says he sent her letters to Gary to him since "I knew I couldn't keep you forever." He's a bastard, but a noble one, apparently. She takes the car to get to Gary as quickly as possible and of course Kirk's chest pains mirror those on his face. He sits on a bench and is still there in the morning, dead. That makes for a nice newspaper picture.
Naturally, Mia is distraught (and Claire is still pretending to be her maid, even back in London), but Gary arrives, having received the letters. "Post office is slow," she jokes. "I've been married and widowed," she tells him, which is news to anyone watching. Did I miss a wedding scene? "We're both very different people now," Gary notes, a line expected since the beginning of the scene. The conversation gets even dumber when she turns on him, opining that he's come back for her money, angry that he wasn't there for her when she was afraid. That's unfair, but remember, he knows they are "different people," so he doesn't have a problem walking out on her.
All of this happened and Mia's first movie hasn't even opened yet, because after a series of flashbacks, Mia and Claire drive up to the premiere, mobbed by press and fans in grand old Hollywood style. Even Topol is there and we haven't seen him since he made the deal with Kirk. Joel tells the crowed they are about to see "the most lavish and probably the most expensive film ever made." There's a shout-out to Kirk and then he introduces Mia. When Mia steps to the microphone, she gives one of those bashful, quiet and very rehearsed speeches that actresses once gave at premieres. Okay, since this is a movie about a movie, it goes on longer than say Vivien Leigh or Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Fontaine might have deemed appropriate, but that's to be expected. Mia outs her mother, who hesitantly moves through the throngs to join her daughter on the steps of the theater. Nobody seems at all upset, which kind of negatives the whole plot, doesn't it? "I'm very proud of where I came from and who I am," Mia says. Gary starts clapping and soon everyone joins in. Boy, when Hollywood decides to absolve itself of its sins, it goes all out, doesn't it? Merle Oberon died in 1979, so she didn't get to see this vindication, but then again, no one really knows her exact story. This one is pure Hollywood fantasy tripe.
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