FABabe

There have been many excellent comments about this movie and I want to add my voice to the praise. Yul Brynner has never been more powerfully attractive. His Major Surov was riveting. Your eyes just cannot leave the screen when he's on it. This is his movie. This is not to slight the rest of the cast which was also exemplary, especially Deborah Kerr and Anne Jackson. As they were mostly stage actors, they brought many nuances to their performances. For example, I have seen this movie at least 4 times, but this is the first time I noticed the reaction of the German girl when she came face-to-face with a Russian soldier. Even though he was not threatening, her absolutely hysterical reaction made me realize that she must have been in Germany after WWII and was most likely gang-raped by the Red Army. The possibility of discovering deeper layers of story that may lie just beneath the surface makes me want to see this fascinating film again and again. Please put it on DVD.

Would it have killed them to take a little bit of the money they set aside for computer generated images to pay a writer or two for a decent script? With a magnificent country like Australia there must be an almost endless supply of great plot ideas. Instead, they created an inedible soup of clichés that proved to be a very unsatisfying meal. How about a little character development? For example, why was Fletcher such a one-dimensional bastard and why would the cattle baron's daughter, who seemed to be a decent human being (although if you blinked, you missed this entire plot point), ever marry him? The movie had no flow and seemed to be edited using a meat ax, and the less said about the acting the better, although I blame the director more than the actors. Australia certainly looked nice, but if you're going to name a film after an entire continent, you should try a little harder to make it a better movie.

With the addition of In Plain Sight, it's official...the summer cable shows like The Closer, Saving Grace, Burn Notice and Damages are so much better than anything the major networks have to offer during the "regular" season. Love the chemistry between Mary and Marshall. Love the quick quips and the realistic dialog. And the addition of a fine looking black detective with the unlikely name of Dershowitz for Mary to butt heads and crack wise with is pure gold.

I do agree that the mother and sister are best in small doses, but they do provide a nice slightly off-balance counterpoint to the thoroughly professional handle Mary has on her work life. One line describes the relationship beautifully: in replying to her n'er-do-well sister's question about why Mary won't just get rid of her defective car, she says "because, like my family, I love it a little more than I want to kill it." The people she's protecting have been getting better and better with each successive show. The most recent, David Foley, was a real hoot as an assassin's middleman.

All in all, I don't care if it's not exactly as law enforcement would do it. I'm not looking for authenticity in a summer show. I'm looking for fun, and In Plain Sight has it in spades.