Word: ditchburn
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...last, it is no; the services asked from Rocky's composer are beyond the call of duty. Just why any young writer should be so cynical in constructing a love story the first time out is hard to fathom. Barra Grant has the dancer (played by Anne Ditchburn of the National Ballet of Canada) move in down the hall from the columnist (Paul Sorvino). There are a number of chance encounters in which she gradually warms to his streetwise but not hardened sensibility, just as he comes to appreciate her strangely withdrawn nature...
...writer. He, too, is preoccupied. He almost misses her brief victory over pain and the tough New York audience because he is trying, unsuccessfully, to save a young boy from his evil, heroin-pushing older brother. Finally, the columnist makes it to the theater, just in time to carry Ditchburn onstage for her curtain calls after her legs have given out. It is surely one of the most embarrassingly heartwarming climaxes in movie history, but somehow appropriate to a movie that would have been too sentimental and preposterous even for Louis B. Mayer...
...usual in Avildsen's work, the direction is on the nose, with no discomfiting originality to disturb audiences. The veteran Sorvino knows enough to be somewhat hangdog about what he is called upon to do, but Ditchburn is too new to the game to be even slightly humiliated by all this nonsense. They meet somewhere in the middle of mediocrity to form their little ensemble. It is a measure of just how careless the raptures of cynicism are that Avildsen tries to pass off an ancient Newark concert hall as Lincoln Center, which it in no way resembles...
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