A Matter of Time (1976)

          As talented as he was versatile, Vincente Minnelli directed a handful of great films, plus quite a few that were merely respectable, before his career started to lose momentum in the late ’60s. Anyone would be proud of a legacy including Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Gigi (1958). Minnelli also lived long enough to watch Liza Minnelli, his daughter with Judy Garland, blossom into a dynamic and award-winning entertainer. The wise move after the moderate success of his Barbra Streisand vehicle On a Clear Day you Can See Forever (1970) might have been to retire gracefully. Unfortunately, showbiz professionals often need to get yanked off the stage, and that’s what happened when Minnelli made his final film, A Matter of Time.
          Convincing Liza to play the leading role presumably trumped any concerns that producers might have had about Minnelli’s old-fashioned style, since she was a hot commodity at the time, and Papa Minnelli recruited another big name, Ingrid Bergman, for the film’s main supporting role. Things didn’t go so well past that point. Minnelli was fired for going overbudget and overschedule. Then distributor American International gutted his footage to generate a 97-minute version of what Minnelli originally intended to be a three-hour epic. Ouch.

          Watching the released cut of A Matter of Time, it doesn’t seem as if Minnelli’s ouster represents a loss to cinema history. Telling the fairy-tale-like story of a maid who rose to fame and fortune by learning from an eccentric old woman how to seduce powerful men, A Matter of Time is overproduced, tone-deaf, and unseemly. After a present-day prologue, the film flashes back to Rome during some undetermined stage of the postwar era, where 15-year-old Nina (Liza) arrives at the decaying hotel where her cousin works as a maid. (Yes, Liza, who was pushing 30 when this film was released, plays her character as a teenager.) Nina befriends the strange Contessa Sanziani (Bergman), who wears a flamboyant cloak with leopard-skin trim and sports ghastly black makeup rings around her eyes. Back in the day, the Contessa played muse to great artists and thinkers, so she passes along her philosophy of, put bluntly, using sex to help men realize their potential even if the woman gets nothing in return. Nina thinks this lifestyle sounds terrific, so she does the Contessa one better by trading sex for wealth and notoriety.

          All of this icky stuff plays out in stilted dialogue scenes, and the gaudy production design gives a more spirited performance than any of the actors. Oh, and about halfway through its running time, the movie suddenly becomes a musical, with Liza howling a few forgettable numbers. Need we even mention the scene in which Mina forgives a would-be rapist for assaulting her because he’s upset about writer’s block? Ultimately, the saddest and strangest thing about A Matter of Time isn’t watching a venerable director derail his career and legacy—Minnelli never made another movie—but the notion that he roped his Oscar-winning daughter into playing an opportunistic whore. Not the best “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” in Hollywood history. Having said that, nepotism worked out better for Bergman, because her daughter Isabella Rossellini made her screen debut in A Matter of Time, playing the small role of a nun.

A Matter of Time: LAME

A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970)

          Notwithstanding Anthony Quinn’s inexplicable casting as a Tennessee native and the unexplained presence of Ingrid Bergman’s Swedish accent, A Walk in the Spring Rain is a passable romantic melodrama. Both actors are strong enough to surmount their miscasting, and the combination of a relatively brisk storyline with resplendent location photography keeps the picture palatable. That said, deep problems permeate A Walk in the Spring Rain. For the first hour or so, the picture is almost completely bereft of dramatic conflict, meaning that the weight of the film falls on entirely on Bergman’s shoulders as she depicts the anguish of a woman torn between her fuddy-duddy husband and a charming stranger. Concurrently, Elmer Bernstein’s score is so chaotic that it ruins the efficacy of many scenes. During stable moments, Bernstein provides straightforward emotional string accents. Yet he also punctuates scenes with virile horn signatures better suited to an action movie, and he periodically employs strange juxtapositions of, say, organ chirps and unidentifiable honking noises. Had the film’s narrative been stronger, these musical excesses wouldn’t have been so noticeable, but sizable stretches of the picture comprise aimless montages and/or silly vignettes of (wait for it) Bergman drinking moonshine and/or imitating the bleating vocalizations of goats.

          The very thin basic story is as follows—when college professor Roger Meredith (Fritz Weaver) and his wife, Libby (Bergman), temporarily relocate from New York to Tennessee so Roger can write a textbook, Libby falls for rugged and upbeat handyman Will (Quinn), even though he’s married to the mousy Ann (Virginia Gregg). Predictable complications ensue, but not with enough frequency or impact. Among the underdeveloped tropes is the relationship between Libby and her daughter, Ellen (Katherine Crawford), who perceives Libby as nothing but a readily available babysitter for Ellen’s young son. Although there’s a smidgen of proto-feminist ideology buried inside A Walk in the Spring Rain, the movie is really about the novelty of middle-aged people experiencing romantic passion. Bergman finds abundant pathos and truth in the material, whereas Quinn toggles between cutesy shtick and overwrought melodrama. Writer-producer Stirling Silliphant, whose massive output for film and television includes as much hackery as it does serious endeavors, adapted the movie from a book by Rachel Maddux, and it’s hard to tell whether he envisioned a grown-up drama or a treacly soap. At various times, A Walk in the Spring Rain is both.

A Walk in the Spring Rain: FUNKY

Autumn Sonata (1978)

          Although Autumn Sonata borders on self-parody because writer-director Ingmar Bergman indulges his pain-freak sensibilities to an excessive degree, the innate humanism and sophistication of his style—combined with two extraordinary performances—give the picture resonance. A tough drama about the ways parents and children hurt each other when they’re unable to connect, the film is particularly noteworthy as the only project on which cinema’s two most famous Bergmans collaborated: Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman returned to her native land (and her native tongue) to give one of the most affecting performances of her career.

          Swedish-cinema icon Liv Ullmann plays Eva, a middle-aged woman living in a remote part of Sweden with her husband, meek pastor Viktor (Halvar Björk). Eva excitedly prepares for a rare visit by her mother, Charlotte (Bergman), a world-famous concert pianist. Immediately upon Charlotte’s arrival, however, myriad complications in the mother/daughter dynamic become evident. For instance, Charlotte is supremely chilly and withholding. Accordingly, while Eva was growing up, Charlotte was an absentee parent who expected her domestic existence life to be sunny and undemanding; by shunning family-oriented stress, Charlotte made real emotional connection with her daughter impossible. As a result, Eva became bitter, insecure, and needy. Thus, upon reuniting with her mother, Eva can’t stop herself from dumping loads of resentment onto Charlotte given the slightest opportunity. Furthermore, Eva surprises Charlotte by revealing that Charlotte’s other daughter, Eva’s sister Helena (Lena Nyman), is living in Eva’s house. Helena is severely disabled, and Charlotte finds time spent in Helena’s company excruciating—Helena radiates emotional thirst that Charlotte cannot quench.

          Filmed in extremely close quarters (the story rarely leaves Viktor’s humble house), Autumn Sonata is suffocatingly bleak. Writer-director Bergman almost never leavens the intense psychodrama with brightness or humor, so viewers are smothered by the dysfunction and pain of two complex women caught in an abusive cycle. At one point, the picture gets so heavy that Eva muses, via voice-over, how much she wishes she could simplify her existence by committing suicide. It is a testament to both leading actors that neither Charlotte nor Eva comes across as caricatured or contrived; these people seem agonizingly real.

          Adding to the grim quality of the experience is Ingmar Bergman’s choice to treat the piece more like a novel or play than pure cinema; actors speak in long, unbroken monologues and, on many occasions, speak directly to the camera or in theatrical soliloquies. Were it not for the amber-tinged beauty of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography and the consummate skill of the leading performances, the film’s arty flourishes would be fatal flaws. But with writer-director Bergman’s masterful hand pulling the strings, Autumn Sonata feels less like indulgence and more like an experiment—it’s as if the filmmaker deliberately discarded arbitrary storytelling conventions and used whatever tools he could in order to push as deeply into the anguished souls of his characters as possible.

Autumn Sonata: GROOVY

The Hideaways (1973)

A lighthearted children’s movie with a reassuring message about appreciating the virtues of home despite the allure of faraway places, The Hideaways was based on E.L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a Newbery Award winner. When the story begins, gangly teenager Claudia Kincaid (Sally Prager) decides to run away from her suburban New Jersey home because she doesn’t feel appreciated. Enlisting her younger brother, preadolescent Jamie (Johnny Doran), as an accomplice, Claudia slips away with Jamie to New York City, then heads straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, since Claudia is fascinated by ancient lore about chivalry. Drawing on their considerable ingenuity, the kids contrive means of living at the museum for several nights, hiding out from guards during closing time, grabbing coins from a wishing fountain for purchasing cafeteria lunches, and sleeping in beds that are on exhibit. While at the museum, Claudia becomes enchancted by a delicate statue of an angel, which may or may not have been carved by Michelangelo, so when homesickness motivates the kids to vacate the museum, they trek to the home of wealthy widow Mrs. Frankweiler (Ingrid Bergman), the statue’s previous owner. One of those gruff-but-loving types found only in children’s movies, Mrs. Frankweiler recognizes a kindred spirit in the willful Claudia, so the older woman shares a secret about the statue with her new young friend, giving Claudia an unexpected reward to her mischievous adventure before Mrs. Frankweiler’s driver escorts the children home. The Hideaways isn’t all that well-made (the children’s acting is just okay and the photography is murky), but the story is a heartfelt celebration of youthful imagination. Obviously, the picture exists in a fantasy realm where nothing bad ever happens to children, and contemporary kiddie viewers weaned on Night at the Museum would probably find the picture interminable. But with its fanciful narrative and sweet themes, to say nothing of Bergman’s formidable presence, The Hideaways is reputable juvenile escapism from a more innocent era. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Hideaways: FUNKY

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

 

          The praise lavished on this bloated Agatha Christie adaptation (including six Oscar nominations and one win) has always mystified me, because while Murder on the Orient Express is a handsomely made film with an intelligent script and an amazing cast, it’s still just a contrived and methodical whodunit. It appears that much of the picture’s novelty derived from the fact that it was a throwback not only to a beloved Hollywood genre, but also to a more sophisticated time in terms of diction, fashion, and manners; somewhat like the aesthetically pleasing accoutrements of the same year’s Chinatown, this film’s glamorous production values and swellegant ’30s costumes were a change of pace from the gritty realism that dominated early ’70s cinema. Furthermore, Murder on the Orient Express is that rare all-star jamboree in which each actor has something interesting to do, with several performers receiving impressive showcase scenes, and even elaborate subplots, during the course of the movie’s lumbering 128 minutes. One could never accuse Murder on the Orient Express of shortchanging the audience.

          As for the story, which screenwriter Paul Dehn adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel, it’s ingenious but not necessarily persuasive, and the lack of any real emotional heft means the experience of watching Murder on the Orient Express is all about luxuriating in production-design eye candy, piecing together clues, and savoring star power. Set in 1935, the movie finds Christie’s urbane detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) riding the famous train mentioned in the title. Poirot becomes enmeshed with a group of people including wealthy American Samuel Ratchett (Richard Widmark), so when Ratchett gets stabbed to death early in the journey, Poirot and Signor Bianchi (Martin Balsam), an executive with the company that owns the train, join forces to determine which passenger was responsible for the crime. The gimmick, as per the Christie formula, is that everyone in a confined space is a suspect, so the closer the investigation gets to the truth, the greater the danger becomes for everyone involved. Despite the film’s posh trappings, this is not highbrow stuff.

          Worse, Murder on the Orient Express is tedious, at least from my perspective, and director Sidney Lumet’s overly respectful treatment is part of the problem. Treating Christie like Shakespeare is as absurd as, say, treating John Grisham the same way. There’s simply no reason for this empty spectacle to sprawl over such a long running time. Giving credit where it’s due, however, Murder on the Orient Express is a visual feast. The clothes, linens, and table settings make the titular train seem like a rolling four-star hotel, and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth uses his signature haze filters to make everything look painterly—to a fault, because sometimes it’s hard to distinguish details. But the biggest selling point, of course, is the high-wattage cast. Beyond those mentioned, players include Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman (who won an unexpected late-career Oscar for her work), Jacqueline Bisset, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Michael York.

Murder on the Orient Express: FUNKY