Word: liza
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flamboyant, lushly elegant stylist, has been responsible not only for some of the greatest movie musicals (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon), but some enjoyably parboiled melodramas as well (The Bad and the Beautiful, Some Came Running). Here he is working for the first time with Daughter Liza, a stops-out entertainer, and such gifted, welcome actors as Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The material, adapted from a novel by Maurice Druon called Film of Memory, would seem suited to all: a sentimental, gilded fairy tale about a poor Italian provincial (Liza) who comes to Rome to work...
...narrators cover almost as much history as the films they elucidate. Shirley MacLaine opens the show and shares the narration with Henry Fonda-a 40-year man in Hollywood-and Liza Minnelli. Schickel's script concludes with a memorable valediction: "LIFE -the magazine-[suspended] publishing in 1972. Life-as we live it -goes on. So do the movies...
...opening frames of A Matter of Time, Liza Minelli is seen riding in a car, gazing pensively at her visage in a hand-held mirror. If the car were to drive off the nearest cliff, you'd be spared what follows--a series of moronic reflections on the mirror's history, featuring Liza and Ingrid (she ain't getting any younger) Bergman. You'd be better off driving yourself down I-95 to look at the fall foliage...
...unholy trio hits the well-manicured streets of Beverly Hills, struggling to recruit the likes of Paul Newman, Anne Bancroft, James Caan, Liza Minnelli and Burt Reynolds, the studio chief stews in his office, combatting a takeover by a notoriously ruthless conglomerate called Engulf and Devour...
Heavy spending, of course, no more guarantees success now than it did in the 1960s. Fox's $12 million Lucky Lady, starring Liza Minnelli, has been an utter flop that contributed heavily to the studio's first-quarter loss of $1.6 million. But moviemaking costs have risen so rapidly that it is just about impossible to attain special-event quality without a huge budget. Special effects like those in The Poseidon Adventure or Earthquake are frightfully expensive to film. Such "bankable" stars as Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand can easily command $1 million a picture; top-name directors...