Word: munchkins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kramer is an adaptation of one of those best-selling, touching novels that appeared a few years ago. Stunningly beautiful Meryl Streep plays Joanna Kramer, who walks out on a torturous eight-year marriage to her ad-man workaholic husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and her seven-year-old munchkin (Justin Henry). The divorce leaves Ted to mother his son, and for months he fails dismally; but after they establish poignant love, Joanna reappears and wants Billy back...
...stewed, maybe you can convince your buddy that Flesh Gordon is really lots better. It isn't, but it's shorter. Parodying the thirties Flash Gordon series, Flesh, an all-American Mr. Clean hero and his two musketeers, pursue the evil sex ray to its source, discovering a sexual munchkin land where Prince Precious and his tandy tribe frolic in spite of the Evil Wang's despotic rule. The special effects--including penises as monsters, trees, spaceships, etc.--all seem like the products of a pervert with a chemistry set in someone's bathroom. None of it really very funny...
Never mind, bankable is bankable, so Ross, straining hard to seem as naive as her little dog Toto, is blown by a snowstorm to Munchkin land. This turns out to be the old New York World's Fair Pavilion at Flushing Meadow, where the Wicked Witch of the East has turned hundreds of juvenile spray-paint vandals into graffiti figures. The yellow brick road leads across the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, where Richard Pryor reigns as the Wiz. But before Dorothy gets there, she meets a roarious but cowardly lion (Ted Ross) and a marvelous scarecrow...
...quite rightly disliked the Munchkin production number and preferred Judy Garland in front of a simple backdrop singing "Over the Rainbow" and Bert Lahr chewing on his tail. The Crimson review in 1939 also went for Gone With the Wind (which has recently had a big revival) and for The Roaring Twenties (which still comes around now and again), "a saga of liquor and love that rolls through that fabulous decade into the gloom of the thirties." And the review highly recommends Bachelor Mother, in which Ginger Rogers, David Niven, and a jitterbug contest "all add up to delightful fare...