Word: forresters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHEN THE FILM refrains from digging up dead dirt on a dead woman and concentrates on creating the live persona of Rose, things improve. The entire sequence with Frederic Forrest as an AWOL Army sergeant is enchanting; Midler's gifts as both a comic and serious actress shine as she creates an original character rather than rehashing old rumors about Joplin...
...shrewdly goes for broke. The Rose has the same visual excess and garish romanticism as the oldtime Technicolor backstage sagas. When Rose gets into a yelling match with her manager (a somewhat forlorn Alan Bates) or plays in bed with her pickup of a lover (a frisky, sexy Frederic Forrest), the closeups are steamy and relentless. When Rose lands by helicopter at her nighttime stadium concerts, it looks like the arrival of the mother ship in Close Encounters (both films were shot by Vilmos Zsigmond). The movie's many drunken barroom brawls, not to mention its gratuitous excursions into...
...intelligence beyond the character's ability to articulate. The star is well supported by Mac Davis, as a smooth ole star quarterback who's learned to get ahead by going along, and by G.D. Spradlin as the head coach, Charles Durning as the assistant coach-enforcer, Steve Forrest as the owner and Bo Svenson as an animalistic lineman...
Certainly the narration does nothing to rescue Willard's thinly sketched crewmates (Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms and Larry Fishburne). They are typical American kids who inexplicably travel together for days without ever engaging in intimate conversation. When they go mad in the film's second half, their transformations seem arbitrarily decreed by Coppola rather than dramatically justified. We feel nothing. Still, the crew members are almost Dostoyevskian in complexity compared with the deranged Kurtz. When we finally meet the renegade at his camp of Montagnard disciples, Apocalypse Now collapses into a terminal anticlimax. An overweight, bald...
...even cooler and more distant as the President and his lieutenants have poured out inflammatory business-bashing rhetoric. The assaults are particularly troubling because they come at a time when the nation can ill afford more divisiveness. "Every big businessman is wondering when it will be his turn," says Forrest Rettgers, chief lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers. "Carter is shooting at oil now, but who will be next...