Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sits astride a big mount named Gilford. The tomboy of the Family sitcom series stars this week in My Old Man, a TV movie in which she is Jo Butler, the track-wise daughter of a down-on-his-luck horse trainer, played by Warren Gates. The film is out of a short story of the same title by Ernest Hemingway, but the bloodline is a little thin. Joe Butler, the American boy in Hemingway's tale about seedy racing in Europe between the wars, never got to ride Gilford. McNichol does, and if you want to know...
Luckily for the audience, the film's early scenes do not focus on individual people. Ballard opens with pure spectacle, allowing his movie to get off to a rousing start. As the camera wanders around an exotic ship traveling near North Africa in 1946, there is mystery and sensuous excitement at every turn. In one corner of the ship, middle-aged adventurers silently play poker for a high-stakes pot of dazzling gems and religious icons. In another, a bizarre team of white-gowned Arabs zealously guards a shrieking black Arabian stallion. When a storm strikes late one night...
...sentimentality of Lassie with the homoeroticism of Equus. Alec and the stal lion find food for each other, watch sun sets together and finally celebrate their relationship in a wild ride along the shore. Once the pah- are rescued and reach Alec's small-town American home, the film's mystical aura evaporates completely. What follows is a rehash of National Velvet...
...rather conventional failings of craftsmanship. The ruse does not succeed. Though the freckle-faced Reno and Mickey Rooney (as the horse's crafty old trainer) are well cast, then-scenes together are perfunctory and impersonal. Emotions are provided in stead by a busy and overbearing musical score. The film's story begins to move in fits and starts. Except for the inevitable big race, it is not advanced visually but by bald snatches of voice-over dialogue. No doubt children in the audience will have a fine time anyway; they may even enjoy the film's prosaic...
...Antonelli is such a straightforward and cheerful girl, neither brazen nor falsely modest when called upon to shed her clothes, the high point, of course, of all her movies. So it seems a shame to place her in the lugubrious context of a picture like The Divine Nymph. The film is yet another period piece, this time set in Italy during the 1920s. One be gins to wonder if the people who produce Antonelli's movies are under the impression that so lush a lady simply cannot be accepted in a contemporary context. Or it may be that...