david-thor

Fred Olen Ray, who knows a successful Christmas formula and sticks with it, wrote and produced his best, of the ones I've seen. With low budget movies, the casting, setting and writing are especially important, and the two leads (who also worked together in 2022 for "Prince and Pauper Christmas") have wonderful chemistry. It was nice to see my hometown East Aurora on display again, and it was a treat to see Dennis DiPaolo play the role of the server Dennis in his family's own restaurant in Buffalo, but at about the halfway mark, I forgot about the local aspects of the movie and began to root for the two leads to fall in love (which was virtually assured), and it was the way in which the relationship developed that made it so easy to watch without taking a break. I also noticed that Don The Shopkeeper (filmed at Vidler's 5 & 10 in East Aurora) has been in previous Ray movies. I hope that the movie company decides to come back to East Aurora for another movie - Christmas or any time. A very pleasant movie to watch and I hope its short run on the Great American Family network continues on a more accessible platform, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.

The worst Green Acres episode, by far, was 'Hawaiian Honeymoon' aired the previous week, and like this episode, it was meant to be a pilot, Richard L. Bare had wisely not directed them, Jay Sommers got roped into writing them, and there was no supporting cast in either. Clearly, the production team knew they had been axed. I've thought about this episode for a long time as to how bad it really was, but it did co-star Elaine Joyce, who went on to have a great Broadway career and was sparkling in this episode, along with other veteran supporting actors. If this was a pilot, there just wasn't enough there to develop a series from it; at least Star Trek's inserted pilot, 'Assignment:Earth' had strong ties to the existing Star Trek original series.

A terrible episode; the supporting cast was gone and Richard L. Bare, one of the best directors in television history, wisely had no part in this. Jay Sommers must have already known about the "rural purge" that CBS was about to execute. Not funny, entirely forgettable, and perhaps there were some sort of contractual issues that forced this, and the next, episode to be created out of nothing. These two final episodes are a sad way to end a classic satire of rural life. There is one scene with a couple, the woman in yellow and the man in white, where you actually see the man mouthing the woman's script. Two stars for the two stars, zero otherwise.