Word: molinaro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...example, the good woman of the title is Shen Te (Priscilla Smith), a ho' in pre-war Setzuan. A sort of Oriental Mary Magdalene, she is the only person in the province willing to house three Gods (Isabell Monk, Harry S. Murphy and Thom Molinaro) on a fact finding mission from heaven. The deities--who obviously left home without it--reward Shen Te with a small fortune and the admonition to continue being good...
...could have made an interesting TV sit-com: the wacky misadventures of a loving and long-suffering nightclub owner and his zany wife, the star of the club's act. The twist, of course, was that husband and wife were both male, the wife a flamboyant transvestite. Still, Edouard Molinaro directed the film with a light touch, making Renato and Albin just another daffy couple who had a way of getting themselves into embarrassing situations. La Cage Aux Folles caricatured most straights as such mean-spirited tight-assed hypocrites that heterosexual audiences could laugh without feeling challenged--which...
...naturally through the old device of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The good-guy secret agents (led by the poker-faced Marcel Bozzuffi) promise to protect Renato and Albin from the bad-guy agents so long as they help them obtain some mysterious microfilm. Molinaro treats us to more than 90 minutes of car chases, dart guns, and hair-breadth close calls, using nearly every cliche of every spy-adventure film ever made--not to create clever satiric effect, but to provide hoakey chills and thrills. As the corpses pile up, La Cage II becomes...
Perhaps, that vaguely kinky thrill is gone. Without the shock of first acquaintance, Renato and Albin seem shallow and Molinaro's placing them in a worn-out stock situation makes them all the more dull. Nevertheless, Molinaro and United Artists seem determined to cash in on the success of the original (the highest grossing foreign film ever released in the U.S.A.) and are supposedly contemplating a La Cage Aux Folles III, Yes, gay couples can behave as ridiculously as straight couples, but how much longer do they expect us to laugh about...
...marvel of sympathetic understatement as the, er, straight man, but Michel Serrault's performance has a forced, even panicky quality here, perhaps because his role is not as well written as it was the first time, lacking as it does both sympathy and well-made gags. Director Molinaro handles most of the action scenes perfunctorily, never realizing their full value either as suspense or as comedy. Since no one has bothered to think up anything new, comic or otherwise, to say about the central relationship, the movie is repetitive when it is not attenuated...