The Screengrab : peter gallagher

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: "Dreamchild" (1985)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

This fanciful British movie boasts one of the unlikeliest collaborations of the last twenty-five years, Dennis Potter and Jim Henson. Potter wrote the script, which is built on a culture-clash factoid from 1932: that year, the 80-year-old Alice Liddell--who, many decades earlier, had been Alice Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll's heroine and the original audience for his Wonderland stories--sailed to the United States to visit Columbia University as part of the celebration of Carroll's centennial. (She died two years later.) Alice is played, by Coral Browne, as a grumpy, out-of-sorts old woman at odds with the new world and a trial to her hired companion, a waifish young girl named Lucy (Nicola Cowper). When they arrive in New York, the two women become attached to Jack (Peter Gallagher), a motormouth newspaperman who decides to serve as Alice's promoter. He also begins a romance with Lucy, which distracts the girl from her usual focus on her employer's every whim and leaves the increasingly befuddled Alice more unmoored than ever. Life is slipping away from Alice, and as it does, her memories, which are ever more indistinguishable from her fantasies, rise up to engulf her.

In flashbacks, we see the young Alice (Amelia Shankley) in her relationship with the Reverend Dodgson (i.e., Carroll), played by Ian Holm, which is based on shared love and affection but also creepy, and not just because Dodgson's feelings for the child may be tinged with sexual longing, but because the girl, acting on what she senses about him, can't resist flaunting her power over him by humiliating him and making him squirm. (Does one reason this movie hasn't made it to DVD have to do with the reluctance in the culture at large to view someone like Dodgson--a man who may have had desires that he channeled into creative work because there was no acceptable way for him to act on them in life--as something more sympathetic than a monster? Can Lewis Carroll co-exist in a world with Dateline NBC?) She also steps into the world of Carroll's books and has conversations with his characters--the Mad Hatter, the March Hair, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle--that are often disorienting and upsetting. Henson's Creature Shop created huge puppets modeled on the John Tenniel illustrations from the books, and they are not cuddly. The Mad Hatter looks as if he'd taken a dose of radiation that only made him both stronger and meaner; the March Hare could bite your head off.

Like a lot of Dennis Potter's works, Dreamchild is a mixed bag, and there are times, especially in the scenes involving the endearingly mismatched young lovers, where the director, Gavin Millar, seems to not have a clue how to stage this stuff but is prepared to hold his nose, dive in, and hope for the best. But it's generally entertaining except for the sequences that are just downright stunning, and it builds to a remarkable scene when the aged Alice, thinking back on her cruelty towards Dodgson, is able to incorporate her better understanding of their relationship and forgive them both. It gives way to an equally remarkable ending, with the older Alice on a rock by the sea, reunited with both Dodgson and his characters. You can believe they're all still out there somewhere.

Summerfest '08: "Summer Lovers"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If beers, rock bands and sausages are all allowed to have summerfests, we here at the Screengrab see no reason why movie blogs shouldn't get to share in the fun. Our Summerfest series will take a look, every Wednesday for fifteen weeks from May until September, at movies with the word 'summer' in the title and some connection, however tenuous, to everybody's favorite bikini party season. These movies are by no means essential; most of them aren't even any good. But they will help you kill a few hours when you're recovering form a margarita hangover. This week, much as we did last week with A Summer Place, we'll be taking a look at a movie that became a huge hit on the strength of a super-cheesy, inescapable theme song and America not wanting to admit it was seeing the movie because it wanted to see sme pretty young things getting it on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present: 1982's Summer Lovers.

THE ACTION: Peter Gallagher, in the days before he was a leather-skinned, hyper-tanned self-parody, plays a Greco-American schmucko who convinces his hot girlfriend to visit the Greek Isles with him for summer vacation. His girlfriend is played by a pre-crazy, but unfortunately not pre-bad-actress, Daryl Hannah, who nails the part of the role where she is required to look hot, but not the part of the role where she is required to play an artsy intellectual photographer. Eventually she gets on Gallagher's nerves, and he starts carrying on with a juicy little archaeologist, played with world-class ennui by the doomed Valerie Quennessen, who you may remember from...well, nothing else ever, really. Daryl stomps off to confront this French tart, and guess what happens? No, really, guess. The answer will shock and amaze you.

THE PLAYERS: Writer/director Randal Kleiser -- yes, folks, this is another auteur-theory bikini movie -- certainly had a strange career. Coming up from TV with The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, he made a huge splash with his first two major films -- Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Both of them made a kerjillion dollars and seemed to prove that Kleiser could do no wrong, and so he went ahead and made Summer Lovers to establish that he could do very wrong indeed. After that, he fell into directing a bunch of kid-flicks, and then apparently met his match in being asked to make a movie that starred both Amanda Bynes and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, after which he fell off the face of the Earth. Gallagher and Hannah both went on to have extremely successful careers, but Valerie Quennessen, who is so admirably naked through most of this movie, became co-founder of the 1980s Obscurity Club with Klinton Spilsbury.

SUMMER FUN: The ubiquity of "Hard To Say I'm Sorry (Get Away)" by Chicago, among a bunch of other hits by the Pointer Sisters, Prince, and Michael Sembello, mde this the inescapable soundtrack of 1982, but as someone who lived through it the first time, I'd call listening to that song less "summer fun" than "summer torture that the authors of the Geneva Conventions were too short-sighted to anticipate". Even worse, while the three main characters develop a menage a trois with one another, at no point in the movie are we treated to a scene of Daryl Hannah and Valerie Quennessen making out! This is as unconscionable as making a movie with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and not letting either of them dance. Also, there is way too little lounging around the beach naked, and way too much sitting around talking about people's feelings. The proper ratio of these activities in a movie like this is 100:0.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately, Peter Gallagher is meant to be portraying a sensitive intellectual and modern male, so there is little room in his weltanschaung for the universal signifier of the big fat party animal. He does spend a lot of time shirtless, which is meant to be a sop to the ladies in hopes that they don't notice what an unbelievably sexist movie this is, what with the two girls servicing his needs all the time and whenever one of them feels a little taken advantage of she gets a lecture on how to not, like, get hung up on the jealousy thing, babe. He also charms Valerie Quennessen by comparing her lovemaking technique to that of a horse.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: If nothing else, Summer Lovers rates very, very high on the Bikini Party Time scale. Shedding all the inhibitions he was forced to observe due to The Blue Lagoon' s underage stars, Kleiser pulls out all the stops here, cramming the movie with as much bikini action as he can possibly conjure up. Even the plot rolls into action with the common observation of tourists who have never actually been to Europe before: look at how uninhibited they all are! They're not, like, all hung up on sex! Therefore, let's screw around as much as is humanly possible. It's pretty stupid, but as '80s softcore goes, you could do a lot worse. Young people would be well advised to watch this movie and realize how desperately bad things were for the rest of us in the 1980s and contemplate how truly far we've come. Everybody needs a little time away...

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.