SIX WEEKS (1982) * My wife awoke in the middle of the night, it took her quite some time falling back asleep, and so naturally she joined me for about the last 30 minutes or so of Six Weeks. She asked me some basic journalistic questions like ‘What’s the little girl dying from?’ ‘I believe it’s leukemia.’ ‘No, it can’t be. It’s got to be something else. I don’t think she’d just suddenly die like that.’
At some point during our discussion, I said that actually this poor little girl has got the dread movie disease where the invariably dead-by-the-end-of-the-movie character becomes ever more beautiful and noble until her big death scene. Yes, the late film critic Roger Ebert named this affliction ‘Ali MacGraw Disease’ after the star of Love Story, the film based on the best-selling novel that one might say started it all way back in 1970.
Movies derived in way or another from Love Story invariably pour it on awful darn thick with the sentiment, until the movie in question becomes a real maudlin exercise. Six Weeks pulls out the stops more than most in this dubious category and that’s why I was utterly amazed that it did not feature a hot-air balloon scene like fellow maudlin tearjerkers Bobby Deerfield, Yes Giorgio, and Just the Way You Are. That’s about the only restraint practiced by Six Weeks.
Casting 101 pairs Dudley Moore (1935-2002) and Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017), fresh off critical and commercial hot commodities Arthur and Ordinary People, respectively. Yes, wow, how far out, both actors have the same last name and they’re apparently not related. They don’t even have the same national origin. Anyway, like Walter Matthau and Jill Clayburgh in the turkey bomb First Monday in October, Moore and Moore do not share the slightest bit chemistry either, that’s for darn sure. Dudley plays a California politician who’s running for Congress, Mary’s a wealthy cosmetics heiress with the precocious 12-year-old daughter already discussed in the opening paragraph. Dudley’s hopelessly lost in an early scene, very late to a political fundraiser where he’s the featured speaker, and the 12-year-old gives him directions and a whole lot more. She wants Dudley to win his election and Moore² to hook up and become the ultimate happy family for her life’s remaining duration.
Katherine Healy plays the dying little girl and she’s a bit, what’s the word, insufferable. She’s one of those movie children with an unlimited supply of wannabe sharp dialogue and snappy comebacks. She’s dying, remember, and that makes her dialogue even worse and her fantasies ever more powerful. Yes, that’s right, she’s got six weeks left and she’s going to live out as many of her fantasies as possible within the production budget of a 107-minute feel good extravaganza.
Moore² and the little girl hit the bright lights of New York City because what better place to live out fantasies on the big screen and little Niki skates at The Rink at Rockefeller Center, takes on the lead in The Nutcracker, and rounds up Moore² for a smug little cutesy pie wedding ceremony that almost extracted wholesale vomit from the pit of my stomach. Not exactly in that order, though, because the wedding ceremony happens before the grandstanding grand finale ballet number. Niki performed her ballet number on center stage, I looked at my wrist like there’s a watch attached to it and said to my wife, ‘It’s about time for the little girl to die.’ Sure enough, that’s what happened in the very next scene.
I left out the part (until now, anyway) about Dudley’s family, his dutiful wife and teenage son. That’s OK, because they’re not that important and don’t stand in the way of the main body of the plot. Speaking of the plot, Six Weeks pushes and pulls so many emotional levers that it becomes one of the most shameful tearjerkers ever made. They finally resorted to yanking them emotions with pliers. Thankfully, I still resisted and this review signals my protest on aesthetic and emotional grounds.
BOMB, BOMB, BOMB: PARTNERS, CHARLIE CHAN AND THE CURSE OF THE DRAGON QUEEN, WHEN TIME RAN OUT
I could only make it through about 30 minutes of Partners and that’s more than enough for at least about 10 lifetimes, I’d say. I gave up on the picture for good around the fourth time star Ryan O’Neal uttered the epithet faggot. Yeah, Partners basically plays Cruising for laughs. Ha-ha, funny … about as funny as punching somebody’s mother in the face.
I consider Partners the absolute worst film from 1982, at least among the 70 or so films that I have seen thus far in my 42 years on this planet. It supplanted Amityville II: The Possession, a lovely little number incorporating blood, vomit, incest, matricide and patricide, fratricide and sororicide, and demonic possession. Never mind Inchon, a $46 million Korean War epic that bombed mightily at the box office with only a $5.2 million return. Never mind Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which features one of the least likable lead characters (Dr. Dan Challis) and lead performances (Tom Atkins) in recent memory. Believe it or not, Partners beats those other films in sheer unpleasantness.
Did longtime TV director James Burrows use Partners for his audition for Will and Grace? I seriously doubt it, because Partners is one of the nastiest pieces of work I have ever seen. Burrows has directed more than 1,000 TV episodes, including 237 Cheers and 75 Taxi and 32 Frasier. Thankfully, Burrows stuck with television after Partners.
Early in the picture, O’Neal asks his boss how he got stuck partnering up (literally) with gay records clerk Kerwin (John Hurt) to infiltrate and investigate a series of murders in the Los Angeles gay community. Anyway, Chief Wilkins (Kenneth McMillan) tells our matinee idol, “Because you’re a good cop, a real good cop. And because of your cute ass.” Maybe that’s how O’Neal himself got the gig. O’Neal certainly dressed up for the part, wearing a ridiculous tank top and then a leather garb in just the portion I watched before saying Roberto Duran on Partners.
— As I sit here before this keyboard and ponder my next direction, I consider how I endured all 95 minutes or so of Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, another great big smelly turd from the early ’80s like the ones mentioned about three paragraphs up.
When folks express this incredible nostalgia for the ’80s, undoubtedly it’s not Charlie Chan or Partners or Inchon, for that matter, they’re nostalgic about, because they SUCK in the immortal words of Al from Caddyshack. Then again, if I have learned anything over the years writing about movies or music online, it’s that somewhere in this great big world there’s a cult following Howard the Duck or Halloween III, for example, and they just might flame you for not cherishing their cult object in the same way they do.
Charlie Chan asks us to believe Peter Ustinov (1921-2004), Richard Hatch (1945-2017), and Angie Dickerson as characters of Asian descent. Sure, I believe the Englishman Ustinov as fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (a character he played six times, including features Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, and Appointment with Death) and Roman emperor Nero in Quo Vadis, but I call it more of a stretch to consider him as Chan in 2020, nearly 40 years after the film was made. It’s even worse for both Hatch and Dickerson.
Charlie Chan features plenty of the broadest comedy and frenzied overacting by a rather distinguished cast that also includes Lee Grant, Brian Keith, Roddy McDowall, Rachel Roberts, and Michelle Pfeiffer early in her career. Hatch plays Chan’s fumbling bumbling stumbling grandson Lee Chan Jr. and I’ve watched so many films lately with fumbling stumbling bumbling would-be detectives that I now grumble and rumble when I see them on the screen. I’m thankful my Grandma never behaved like the one played by Grant in Charlie Chan. Keith’s police chief says ‘Goddamn’ about 50 times. McDowall and Roberts play Grant’s domestic helpers, Gillespie and Mrs. Dangers respectively, but they both provide little help to Charlie Chan since they are both in the grand tradition of melodramatic domestic help in the movies; Mrs. Dangers calls to mind Patsy Kelly’s frantic maid in The Gorilla. Pfeiffer could have dialed the perkiness down a notch or few and still have saved enough for the rest of her career. Nearly all of these characters are cringeworthy.
— When Time Ran Out came out Mar. 28, 1980 and it eventually fell about $16 million short of making its $20 million production budget back at the American box office.
Later that year, on July 2, Airplane parodied Airport specifically and disaster movies in general, and became one of the biggest hits of the summer and the entire calendar year.
The failure of When Time Ran Out and the success of Airplane signaled the end of the disaster movie, at least in the form that dominated the first half of the seventies with The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and Towering Inferno and then dribbled out pure unadulterated dreck the final half of that decade like The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and Meteor. Since I mentioned Meteor, I also have to mention Avalanche, which provided disaster footage recycled in Meteor as if being in one disaster of a disaster movie just simply was not enough.
Master of disaster Irwin Allen (1916-91) produced at least half the films mentioned in the paragraph right above this one and he even stepped in the director’s chair for the turkey bombs The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. Allen called on Rollercoaster director James Goldstone for When Time Ran Out, which features the required number of old time movie stars, hot commodities, and fledgling character actors. When Time Ran Out should have been called Take the Money and Run, though Woody Allen and Steve Miller already used it for a comedy (1969) and a hit song (1976).
We have William Holden (1918-81), Paul Newman (1925-2008), Jacqueline Bisset, Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012), James Franciscus (1934-91), Burgess Meredith (1907-97), Red Buttons (1919-2006), Barbara Carrera, Pat Morita (1932-2005), Veronica Hamel, Edward Albert (1951-2006), and Alex Karras (1935-2012), as well as a volcano, a tidal wave, etc.
Seemingly half of the cast takes part in a glorified soap opera before the molten lava really begins to flow and they have to repeat business from Beyond the Poseidon and seemingly every other disaster movie of the era. Here’s that glorified soap opera: Holden proposes to Bisset very early in the movie and she turns him down because she’s in love with Newman, who’s not the marrying kind and anyway he does not seem to much care for Bisset but maybe he’s just masking his true feelings toward her with standard male bluster. Franciscus is married to Hamel but he’s fooling around with half-brother Albert’s significant other Carrera. Just wait, it gets better, Albert does not know that he’s Franciscus’ half-brother … and Holden and Hamel are sleeping together. I think I just about nailed it down and you’re right if you’re thinking all that seems like too much plot for such a dimwitted movie.
You’re also right that I hated these characters and their miserable lives, and rooted for the volcano to wipe them all out.
Especially Franciscus, who takes chronic disbelief in the face of impending disaster to new lows in When Time Ran Out. Unfortunately, an incredibly shoddy special effect leads to an incredibly unsatisfying death for Franciscus’ character. We crave to see him bite the dust or eat molten lava in spectacular fashion, and what we get is just plain laughable.
Of course, just plain laughable describes about 99 percent of When Time Ran Out.
Believe it or not, costume designer Paul Zastupnevich earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design and went against winner Tess, The Elephant Man, My Brilliant Career, and Somewhere in Time, all of them period films where the look of the film itself becomes another important character.
Yeah, I hope the 1981 Oscar broadcast used a shot of Newman in his utterly ridiculous Urban Cowboy garb.
Zastupnevich received a nomination for the same award two years before for his edgy, state-of-the-art costume work on The Swarm, beekeeper outfits. The Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot period murder mystery Death on the Nile won the prize.
I hate to say it, but time ran out on this review because I don’t want to consider When Time Ran Out any longer than I already have.
Partners No stars; Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen 1/2*; When Time Ran Out *
Attack of the Killer Librarian 