Lejink

It wasn't surprising to read that Douglas Sirk was offered first dibs on this epic weepie. The master melodramatist, however, decided not to come out of retirement for the assignment, but I have to say that David Lowell Rich makes for an able substitute, seamlessly fitting in with many of the other components of Sirk's great run of features from the late 50's, including Ross Hunter as producer, Lana Turner as the star and especially Russell Metty as principal cameraman.

Turner once again suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Holly Anderson, the loving wife of the coming man, John Forsythe's wealthy American diplomat Clayton Sr. She dotes on their baby son Clayton Jr, but when Sr's aspiring career requires him to spend more time away from home in Washington, she recklessly falls in with Ricardo Montalban's smooth playboy, Phil Benton much to the annoyance of hubby's possessive sister Estelle, played by Constance Bennett.

When Eddie comes on too strong however at his place, it ends tragically for him, giving Estelle the chance she's been waiting for to effectively cancel Holly, faking her death and exiling her abroad to Denmark without a by-your-leave. There, she's romanced by a handsome middle-aged pianist but her burden of guilt won't allow her to accept his advances. From there, it really is downhill all the way until she hits rock bottom when she encounters Burgess Meredith's sleazy blackmailer who discovers her true identity and seeks to profit from it. Suffice it to say, the ballloon really goes up from there, culminating in a lengthy courtroom sequence where events come full circle for this unhappy woman.

This soap opera drama comes with more suds than Persil and it's up to the viewer to decide how much of a lather they can take. Me, I love a good soak in a bath of hot bubbles and so just let myself lie back and enjoy every ludicrous, high-pitched moment of it.

Metty's camera-work is sumptuous throughout, Lowell Rich shows himself to be an apt pupil of Sirk and the acting throughout by all the principals is commendably arrow-straight, particularly Turner as the tortured heroine, the only exception being Meredith, who appears to be miscast as the baddie.

Changing tastes dictated the critical and box office failure of the film on first release but if you planted this slap bang in the middle of Sirk's glorious run which began ten years earlier, I don't think you could spot the join, which is high praise indeed.

This provocative, far-reaching four-part Channel 4 drama focuses on an illicit love-affair between a young female primary school teacher Cushla and an older Protestant human rights solicitor, Michael Agnew, who has chosen to represent three IRA members who claim police brutality against them. They meet in a popular Belfast bar owned and managed by Cushla's brother where Michael is counted as one of the locals, although it's also frequented by off-duty soldiers from the occupying/peacekeeping British Army, depending on your political point of view.

Although she has another fellow-teacher, the on-the-surface bland and unexciting Gerry, pursuing her, she's soon headlong into an intensely passionate and physical affair with Michael, even as she knows he's married with a son. They're soon making trysts in his city centre love-nest, but the deeper the affair goes, the more strain their burgeoning relationship will come under.

Cushla has other worries too. Her recently widowed mother has hit the bottle hard and is becoming increasingly difficult to live with while the sympathy she shows to the family of one of her young pupils, the offspring of a mixed-religion couple, also brings her trouble.

It all comes to a head with the shocking climax to episode three, leaving Cushla to pick up the pieces and try to deal with the aftermath of her affair. Personally, I found the fourth and final episode to be somewhat anti-climactic in terms of tying up the loose ends, while the tag-on sugar-coated epilogue likewise also seemed unnecessary.

The evocation of mid-70's Northern Ireland was certainly captured in terms of the fashions, cars and domestic and public house interiors, although the choices of background and incidental music had me reaching for the mute button. The bitterness between the two sides of the religious divide and especially those caught in the middle by entering into mixed religion relationships was well brought out. Lola Petticrew as Cushla came over well as the unwitting party caught literally in the cross-hairs of sectarian hatred, Tom Cullen was good too as the handsome charming adulterer, but the real eye-opening performance was by Gi(llia)n Anderson as Cushla's "Gin, gin, everywhere" waste-of-space mother.

For the most part then, this was a gritty and believable series, all the more so as I grew up in Glasgow at around this time. Although I was aware of religious prejudice around me, I couldn't begin to comprehend living with its ugly, tribal manifestation as represented here just across the Irish Sea at the very same time.

Taking in themes of race relations, parenthood, domestic abuse and piling them onto the events of November 22nd 1963, the date of the Kennedy assassination, for me, in the end overloaded this movie, no matter its various good intentions.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Lurene, on the face of it, a typical Southern housewife living in Dallas. We learn that she recently miscarried her first baby and now just seems to tolerate more than love her boorish husband played by Brian Kerwin. Besotted with Jackie Kennedy, she's determined to see the First Lady in person, but instead will find herself drawn into the plight of a black man, Denis Haysbert's Paul Cator, on the run after abducting his very cowed five year old daughter Jonell, from a children's home. Together the three of them endure a long dark night of the soul with the police in hot pursuit and will rub up against different racial attitudes, all to the backdrop of the events in Washington as Mrs Kennedy has to grieve for her slain husband under the full glare of the media.

The film attempts to juxtapose the true black experience in the American South to today's rosy perception that Kennedy was the black man's friend who made a positive difference to their daily lives. But as one rather clunky, predictable event succeeds another, especially when Lurene and Paul are flung together one night in a barn, for me, the film's narrative credibility was broken.

Sporting a platinum blonde wave which makes her the spit of Marilyn Monroe, Pfeiffer puts over a convincing accent and comes across well as the ditzy but determined and well-meaning Lurene. Naysbert does his best playing the stereotypically noble, strong but silent handsome black man, first personified in movies by the likes of Sidney Poitier back in the day. A word of praise though for the young child actress playing his daughter.

This road movie with a social conscience clearly meant well and certainly captured the era but ultimately failed to take me with it along the way.