The action in the movie would be ludicrous anyway, but is even more peculiar in a cross-dressing comedy. There’s a long sequence in which Tony, the Izzard character, does a marked-down Marlene Dietrich before a wildly enthusiastic audience of Nazis. Surely they know he is, if not a spy, at least a drag queen? I’m not so sure. I fear the movie makes it appear the Nazis think he is a sexy woman, something that will come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Eddie Izzard, including Eddie Izzard.
Watching the movie, it occurred to me that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were not any more convincing as women in Some Like It Hot. And yet we bought them in that comedy, and it remains a classic. Why did they work, while the Queen’s Men manifestly do not? Apart from the inescapable difference in actual talent, could it have anything to do with the use of color?
Black-and-white is better suited to many kinds of comedy because it underlines the dialogue and movement while diminishing the importance of fashions and eliminating the emotional content of various colors. Billy Wilder fought for black-and-white on Some Like It Hot because he thought his drag queens would never be accepted by the audience in color, and he was right.
The casting is also a problem. Matt LeBlanc does not belong in this movie in any role other than, possibly, that of a Nazi who believes Eddie Izzard is a woman. He is all wrong for the lead, with no lightness, no humor, no sympathy for his fellow spies, and no comic timing. I can imagine this movie as a black-and-white British comedy, circa 1960, with Peter Sellers, Kenneth Williams, et al., but at this time, with this cast, this movie is hopeless.
Almost Salinas
(DIRECTED BY TERRY GREEN; STARRING JOHN MAHONEY, LINDA EMOND; 2003)
Almost Salinas is a sweet and good-hearted portrait of an isolated crossroads and the people who live there or are drawn into their lives. Shame about the plot. The people are real, but the story devices are clunkers from Fiction 101; the movie generates goodwill in its setup, but in the last act it goes haywire with revelations and secrets and dramatic gestures. The movie takes place in Cholame, the California town where James Dean died in 1955, and maybe the only way to save it would have been to leave out everything involving James Dean.
John Mahoney stars as Max Harris, the proprietor of a diner in a sparsely populated backwater. He’s thinking of reopening the old gas station. Virginia Madsen is Clare, his waitress, and other locals include Nate Davis, as an old-timer who peddles James Dean souvenirs from a roadside table, and Ian Gomez, as the salt-of-the-earth cook.
The town experiences an unusual flurry of activity. A film crew arrives to shoot a movie about the death of James Dean. Max’s ex-wife, Allie (Lindsay Crouse), turns up. And a magazine writer named Nina Ellington (Linda Emond) arrives to do a feature about the reopening of the gas station. If this seems like an unlikely subject for a story, reflect that she stays so long she could do the reporting on the reopening of a refinery. She gradually falls in love with Max, while one of the young members of the film crew falls for Clare’s young assistant behind the counter.
The place and the people are sound. Mahoney has the gift of bringing quiet believability to a character; his Max seems dependable, kind, and loyal. Virginia Madsen is the spark of the place, not a stereotyped, gum-chewing hash slinger, but a woman who takes an interest in the people who come her way. If Emond is not very convincing as the visiting reporter, perhaps it’s because her job is so unlikely. Better, perhaps, to make her a woman with no reason at all to be in Cholame. Let her stay because she has no place better to go, and then let her fall in love.
From the movie’s opening moments, there are quick black-and-white shots of Dean’s 1955 Porsche Spy der, racing along a rural highway toward its rendezvous with death. The arrival of the film crew, with its own model of the same car, introduces a series of parallels between past and present that it would be unfair to reveal.
Spoiler warning! Without spelling everything out, let us observe, however, that it is unlikely that a character who was locally famous in 1955 could stay in the same area and become anonymous just by changing his name. It is also unlikely that he would be moved, so many years later, to the actions he takes in the film. And cosmically unlikely that they would have the results that they do. Not to mention how pissed off the film company would be.
As the movie’s great revelations started to slide into view, I slipped down in my seat, fearful that the simple and engaging story of these nice people would be upstaged by the grinding mechanics of plot contrivance. My fears were well grounded. Almost Salinas generates enormous goodwill and then loses it by betraying its characters to the needs of a plot that wants to inspire pathos and sympathy, but inspires instead, alas, groans and the rolling of eyes.
The Amati Girls
(DIRECTED BY ANNE DE SALVO; STARRING CLORIS LEACHMAN, MERCEDES RUEHL; 2001)
A lot of saints are mentioned in The Amati Girls, including Christopher, Lucy, Cecelia, Theresa (the Little Flower), and the BVM herself, but the movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to pay to see it.
The movie’s a tour of timeworn clichés about family life, performed with desperation by a talented cast. Alone among them, Mercedes Ruehl somehow salvages her dignity while all about her are losing theirs. She even manages to avoid appearing in the shameless last shot, where the ladies dance around the kitchen singing “Doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum, diddy-dum.”
The movie is about a large Italian-American family in Philadelphia. Too large, considering that every character has a crisis, and the story races from one to another like the guy on TV who kept all the plates spinning on top of the poles. This family not only has a matriarch (Cloris Leachman) but her superfluous sister (Lee Grant) and their even more superfluous sister (Edith Field). There are also four grown daughters, two husbands, two hopeful fiancés, at least three kids, and probably some dogs, although we never see them because they are probably hiding under the table to avoid being stepped on.
The adult sisters are Grace (Ruehl), who is married to macho-man Paul Sorvino (“No Padrone male will ever step foot on a ballet stage except as a teamster.”); Denise (Dinah Manoff), who is engaged to Lawrence (Mark Harmon) but dreams of show biz (she sings “Kiss of Fire” to demonstrate her own need for St. Jude); Christine (Sean Young), whose husband, Paul (Jamey Sheridan), is a workaholic; and poor Dolores (Lily Knight), who is retarded. Denise and Christine think Grace is ruining her life with guilt because when she was a little girl she ran away and her mother chased her and fell, which of course caused Dolores to be retarded.
Sample subplot: Dolores decides she wants a boyfriend. At the church bingo night, she sits opposite Armand (Doug Spinuzza), who, we are told “has a head full of steel” after the Gulf War. This has not resulted in Armand being a once-normal person with brain damage, but, miraculously, in his being exactly like Dolores. At the movies, after they kiss, he shyly puts his hand on her breast, and she shyly puts her hand on his.
You know the obligatory scene where the reluctant parent turns up at the last moment for the child’s big moment onstage? No less than two fathers do it in this movie. Both Joe (Sorvino) and Paul have daughters in a ballet recital, and not only does Joe overcome his loathing for ballet and even attend rehearsals, but Paul overcomes his workaholism and arrives backstage in time to appear with his daughter.