Word: bergmans
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...gunmen run into nuns carrying food; when a tryst is interrupted by the return of the jealous husband, the young lover hides (you guessed it) under the bed; and the final chase scene takes place on-and off-stage during a performance of Verdi's Otello. To be fair, Bergman usually knows how cliched his situations are, and he often satirizes them in clever ways. In a typical over-melodramatic sequence, for example, handsome Bob Fine (O'Neal) meets and falls in love with the voluptuous and married Lira (Mariangela Melato). They gaze intensly at each other, finally they clasp...
Writer-director Andrew Bergman, no doubt a student of Shakespeare, has structured this comedy according to the truest Elizabethan standards of the form. All the elements are there, and in their proper places: a young protagonist, who starts out naive and ends up worldly; a humourously complicated love-at-first-sight affair, complete with bawdy slapstick; a "unifying theme" (quite a pleasant surprise for comedies of late); and, of course, the happy ending where everyone gets married...
...HUMOR THROUGHOUT So Fine is tongue-in-cheek and improbable, but with it Bergman manages to tell a surprisingly well-conceived story. Bob Fine starts out as a naive and inexperienced English professor, who joins his father's floundering dress-making company. After a disastrous first day on the job, his father (Jack Warden) tells him he needs to "get laid," which he promptly does, by Lira. The only trouble is that Lira is married to Mr. Eddie (Richard Kiel), a mean and monstrous loan shark who takes over Fine Fashions. The predictable mayhem ensues, during which young Fine learns...
Unfortunately, the performances of the main characters do not do justice to Bergman's script. O'Neal is only somewhat convincing as the nerdy English professor, a man who talks about decor while a beautiful woman is seducing him. When he is called upon to grow in the movie, he manifests the change more in his costume than in his manner. Melato does acceptably as the lusty, Latin, sexually frustrated wife, but she fails to being much originality to this fairly conventional role. As character actors, Warden and Kiel deliver their roles in the usual manner: Warden as the gruff...
SURPRISINGLY, the cinematography -- often neglected in mass market comedies--really stands out in So Fine. Bergman fills his movie with very precise and stark images, from the perfect whiteness of a steam bath to the glaring neon colors of a disco. Though inconcequential to the plot, the film's most brilliantly conceived scene is an imaginary advertisement for the So Fine blue jeans, in which set, graphics, color, music and choreography all combine to create a powerful image which far outclasses anything currently shown...