Let It Be Me

There's not much to this movie, but it's sweet and has a fairly good ending. It was worth watching just to see Patrick Stewart and Leslie Caron dancing. Yancy Butler, from Witchblade on TNT, is a pretty good dancer herself.

Let it be Me is nothing more than a cute romantic film about couples who falls in love during dance lessons. I remember James Goodwin from his Another World days. It's nice to see Leslie Caron again as Patrick Stewart's love interest. The dancing could have been better though without being corny at times. Otherwise, it is well worth a watch to see couples fall in love. It's not Dirty Dancing but it's from the writer who created that phenomenon. Let It Be Me is about couples who get together during dance classes. The cast is first rate with Leslie Caron, Patrick Stewart, Jennifer Beals and Jamie Goodwin. It's not what you expect but it's okay and fare.

If you like dancing, you'll like this film in general but you might find it a little boring in places. Patrick Stewart is charming and he has a really good chemistry with Leslie Caron. It's really nice to see Jennifer Beals again, she's a fine actress and one of the great beauties of Hollywood, though she doesn't flaunt it like so many others. I saw on the credits that Elliott Gould (a great dancer) was in this film, but for the life of me, I could not find him in this movie.

Why is there such a sharp division of opinion on this charming movie? I suspect because it is a "difficult" romantic comedy. In almost all romantic comedies, it's clear from the credits which couples will end up with each other. The male and female leads are destined to be paired, as are the secondary male and female stars, and the pleasure lies in seeing the couples correctly sorted out after a lot of confusion. In "Let It Be Me," the only absolutely perfect pairing is that of third leads Patrick Stewart and Leslie Caron. It's a very close question whether the engaged couple, Campbell Scott and Jennifer Beals, and the dance studio partners, James Goodwin and Yancey Butler, are really destined for each other or whether they should change partners and dance. "Some people just belong together," Beals says, but which people is a harder question to answer here than in most comedies, though it is satisfactorily answered by the ending.

This has got to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It just came on German television (never made it to the cinemas), and was one of those movies that you watch totally flabergasted, wondering what the makers were thinking when they first realised how bad the movie they were working on is and why they didn't stop there and then. One also has to wonder why the movie has no plot. Brief outline:

Boring guy passes a dance place, decides to learn to dance. Learns to dance there, becomes really good, meets charismatic dance teacher and fat guy. Gets on everybody's nerves because he's dancing all the time. Takes his fiance to the dance place where she meets her ex-dance partner from high school, who just happens to be the boyfriend/husband of the boring guy's dance instructor. In between all of this, Patrick Steward, who is also a dance instructor, falls in live with an older student and they get married at the end. As do the boring guy an his fiance but only after several "steamy" scences b/t the boring guy and his dance teacher and his fiance and the husband of the dance instructor. What really disappointed me was that there was no big state-wide dance competion that the boring guy and his wife win in the end. Can't have everything, I guess.

Only groteque fascination allowed me to watch all of this movie. Oh: the German titel is: "Flirty Dancing"!