THE BLACK HOLE

Yvette Mimieux and Anthony Perkins

THE BLACK HOLE (1979). Director: Gary Nelson.

On an exploratory trip in space, a ship discovers what at first appears to be a derelict vessel floating near a deadly black hole. But inside this huge ship, the Cygnus, the crew come across Dr. Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell of Return From the Ashes), who claims to be the only survivor. Reinhardt is determined to actually take the Cygnus inside the black hole and hopefully discover some of the secrets of the universe. Dr. Durant (Anthony Perkins) is anxious to go with Reinhardt on the trip, but psychic Dr. MacCrae (Yvette Mimieux)  and the others -- Captain Holland (Robert Forster), Lt. Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), and Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine) -- desperately try to talk him out of it. The Black Hole features some fine scenic design and FX, but its schizoid script, tediously stretched-out climax, unfortunate comedy relief involving cute robots playing video games and the like, and a disappointing finale (reportedly the Disney studio ran out of either time, money, or both to create the Black Hole sequence in the intended manner), make this a disappointing effort to say the least. Slim Pickens [Night Gallery] and Roddy McDowall [Fright Night] voice the two overly precious robots who help the team and seem modeled on R2D2 from Star Wars. A lot more could have been made of the fact that some of Reinhardt's "robots" actually turn out to be sort-of lobotomized crew members. Some of the more exciting scenes involve an asteroid shower and a harrowing journey through a tunnel. The acting is generally good (even if Perkins is doing his usual "spooky" routine), with Schell taking top honors.

Verdict: Good idea just misses. **1/2.

FIVE FINGER EXERCISE

FIVE FINGER EXERCISE (1962). Director: Daniel Mann. From the stage play by Peter Shaffer.

When Philip Harrington (Richard Beymer) comes home from Harvard, he discovers that his mother, Louise (Rosalind Russell), has hired a German tutor, Walter (Maximilian Schell), for her young daughter, Pamela (Annette Gorman). Louise is pretentious and fancies herself more cultured than she actually is (she shells peas as Walter is giving a piano concert), and finds her husband, Stanley (Jack Hawkins) to be gruff, plodding and unimaginative. Philip is going through his own growing pains, and resists Stanley's attempts to bond with him, even as Stanley continually berates the young man for being too "sensitive" and is angry that his wife seems ungrateful for all he has given her. Louise finds herself becoming romantically and physically drawn to Walter, and it is more than likely that the confused, troubled Philip has developed a crush on Walter as well. Trouble begins when these characters allow their assorted jealousies to get the better of them. Five Finger Exercise was based on a very successful 1958 British play by Peter Shaffer, and the story was transplanted to American shores and watered down, as was usually the case with material too frank for the Hollywood censors. Beymer [Adventures of a Young Man] gives it the old college try and has some good moments, but he's miscast, while an excellent Schell [Return from the Ashes] is more appropriate for his role. Rosalind Russell and Jack Hawkins [She Played with Fire] go together like oil and water, which is perhaps the point -- both give good performances. Philip has a good speech about how he is more than just an extension of his father, but is his own distinct person. An in-joke shows a poster of Russell in Auntie Mame when she walks into a store.

Verdict: Family Values turned upside down. ***.

RETURN FROM THE ASHES

Ingrid Thulin and Maximilian Schell

RETURN FROM THE ASHES (1965). Director: J. Lee Thompson.

"I was revolted, curious, shocked -- even thrilled."

"A man should always marry a woman with beautiful eyes. That way there's always something to love, no matter what happens."

"I came to you for advice, not the truth."

Michelle (Ingrid Thulin), a wealthy widow who also happens to be a doctor, falls in love with a poor chess player named Stanislaus Pilgrin (Maximilian Schell) in pre-WW 2 Paris. After the Nazis occupy the city, Stan marries the Jewish Michelle more as an act of defiance than anything else, but immediately after the wedding she's taken off to a concentration camp. After four years of Hell and a fifth in a sanitarium, Michelle makes her way back to Paris. At first Stan not only doesn't recognize his own wife, but thinks she must be dead and this woman her mere lookalike. He asks her to "pretend" to be Michelle -- herself -- so that he and her step-daughter, Fabienne (Samantha Eggar), can claim her 30 million franc fortune. And things get more twisted after that ... In a pre-credit sequence set on a train taking Michelle to Paris, a mischievous little boy falls through the door, and an old man remarks to his wife that Michelle, who has absolutely no reaction to the child's death, must have an "incredible lack of feeling." Then he sees the numbers tattooed on her arm and realizes why she is emotionally dead inside ... The trouble with Return from the Ashes is that nothing else as powerful as this opening sequence ever occurs in the movie, which turns more or less into a comparatively ordinary suspense film. On the other hand, Return sets up some intriguing situations, isn't entirely predictable, and boasts excellent performances from the entire cast, including Herbert Lom as a doctor friend of Michelle's. Attractive Thulin [The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse] gives an assured and authoritative lead performance; Schell [Judgment at Nuremberg] makes a charismatic "bad boy;" and Eggar expertly limns the petulant, sexual woman-child. The film also has interesting characters and some excellent dialogue. Still one might have hoped that such a momentous occurrence as the Holocaust might have developed into something a little more explosive than a fairly standard murder mystery. Attempts to equate atheism with "evil" are a little tiresome. J. Lee Thompson also directed Happy Birthday to Me.

Verdict: Despite disappointing aspects, this is an absorbing suspense film with some fascinating elements and several fine performances. ***.

WISEGUY Seasons 2, 3, and 4

Jerry Lewis

WISEGUY Season 2, 3 4. 1988 - 1990.

Wiseguy continued to be a good and watchable series throughout its second season. As already noted, the "Dead Dog Records" arc was not included on the official DVD but was the highlight of the second season if not of the show itself. There were other fine story arcs in season 2, however, such as one in which Jerry Lewis and Ron Silver played father and son in the garment industry who were in conflict with a riveting Stanley Tucci as a gangster. For several of these episodes Anthony Dennison filled in for an injured Ken Wahl, and was fine. There was also a shorter arc with an excellent Fred Dalton Thompson as a politician involved with a white supremacy group. Vinnie's priest brother is murdered, and in a truly unlikely development his mother marries an old retired mafioso well-played by George Petrie (who frequently appeared on The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason). One of the best second season episodes was a stand-alone story in which Frank's wife is dying and he and Vinnie try to figure out how to get the money for an operation for her.Wahl continued to exhibit his star charisma and Jonathan Banks was superb as Frank McPike.

Wiseguy  took a real nose dive in its third season, however. It started off well enough with story arcs in which Vinnie takes his stepfather's place at the table of assorted mafioso -- surely a very strange situation -- and has to contend with assorted rivalries and resentments all the while maintaining his cover. Another story arc in which Vinnie goes to Washington D.C., uncovers all sorts of skulduggery, including a plot to ruin the Japanese economy, and winds up arrested, featured fine performances from Ray Stricklyn and especially Norman Lloyd. Wahl exhibited his versatility by playing Vinnie's father in a stand-alone flashback episode, but another single episode in which an old girlfriend turns out to be a cop and thinks Vinnie is a hood, was left dangling. Instead we got the worst story arc in the series' history, in which Vinnie goes to a small town to investigate a man who seems to hold sway over the citizens like an old time European lord. This man, Volcheck, badly played by Steve Ryan, is obsessed with the film Mr. Sardonicus, which is a hell of a lot more watchable than these truly awful episodes of Wiseguy. The unbelievable story also brought back Roger LoCocco (William Russ) in a completely contrived manner, and had Vinnie freaking out and running off in the middle of an assignment, a development which was even more implausible than the rest of the story arc. The season ended up with Eddie Bracken playing a priest and giving a poor performance that matched the general third-rateness of these episodes. We saw more of Jim Byrnes as Lifeguard, who got a girlfriend.

For the fourth and final season, Vinnie -- or rather Ken Wahl -- ran off for good and left the series. Vinnie Terranova was killed off off-screen, but as his body was not found it may have left the door open for a return which never happened. Instead the new hero of the show was Michael Santana (Steven Bauer) a former prosecutor who winds up working with Frank McPike to take down a powerful man (an excellent Maximilian Shell) who thinks of Michael as a son. These episodes weren't terrible, but it just wasn't the same show. In further changes, both Michael and McPike joined the U.S. Attorney's office when the OCB [Organized Crime Bureau] was dissolved. Yet another change occurred in the final episode which featured a dynamic Billy Dee Williams as a tough high school principal who is asked to run for mayor and wants Santana to help in his campaign. How McPike would have fit in with this, no one knows; the series was canceled and the last three episodes, including the one with Williams, were never telecast. The best fourth season episode, in which Michael's friend Hillary (Cecil Hoffman) tries to bring a company that sells defective plane parts to justice, was also never aired. Bauer, Banks and Hoffman gave very good performances, however, and there was also nice work from Michael Learned as Hillary's mother and Fredric Lehne as lawyer Winston Chambers.

Verdict: Season 2: ***1/2. Season 3: **1/2. Season 4: **1/2.

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG

Note that "Judgment" is misspelled!

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG (1961). Producer/director: Stanley Kramer.

"There can never be any justification for these [acts] -- not in generations, not in centuries."

"It's not the killing that's the problem -- it's the disposal of the bodies."

"We beat the greatest war machine since Alexander the Great -- and now the boy scouts take over."

In 1948, after the "big guns" in the National Socialist Party have already been put on trail, some "smaller fry" -- judges who helped enact the illegal and immoral laws of Nazi Germany -- are also put on trial in Nuremberg. The presiding judge is Dan Heywood (Spencer Tracy), with Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark) as prosecutor and Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) as the defense attorney. The most famous defendant is a well-respected jurist named Dr. Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster). Rolfe claims that the U.S. can hardly act morally superior when they dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while Heywood discovers that virtually no one in Nuremberg will admit they knew what was going on in the concentration camps. Meanwhile Lawson is told that the U.S. will need Germany as an ally in the cold war and convicting some of its leading citizens may not be such a good idea. But Lawson was one of the men who liberated the camps, he has horrifying memories, and shows films (actual documentary footage) of Nazi atrocities -- the ovens, children sentenced to death, piles of rotting corpses, starved and frightened human beings, drawings made on human skin, severed heads (all of which is quite hard to watch but highly necessary for the movie's ultimate impact) -- and isn't about to let these guys walk if he can help it. Only two years after the end of the war, he fears that the world is already losing interest. Schell won an Oscar, and deserved it. Widmark gives one of his best performances, and Tracy is superb. Marlene Dietrich also turns in an excellent performance as the widow of a Nazi who has already been executed, and Judy Garland has a fine turn as a woman who was put in jail at sixteen for alleged perjury when a Jewish father figure was accused of intimate relations with her, an Aryan. Montgomery Clift is also superb as a Jewish witness who was forcibly sterilized years before and argues that one could not expect him to be entirely rational after such an experience. Lancaster is a comparative lightweight in this cast, and isn't well-cast as a German, but he does his best and has a few good moments. Some of the best scenes are between Tracy and Dietrich as they try to understand each other's viewpoints, particularly a scene in a lively beer hall after Heywood has seen the disturbing movies taken in the camps and Dietrich protests that few Germans really knew what was going on -- but he just can't quite buy it. There are many other good supporting performances in the film, especially Virginia Christine as a German housekeeper who argues that Hitler did some good things along with the bad. Judgment at Nuremberg covers all viewpoints and all the bases in highly dramatic fashion, and while over three hours long, is never boring. It ends in a most satisfying fashion, and Tracy's final lines -- written by screenwriter Abby Mann -- pretty much sum it up.

Verdict: A masterpiece about a shameful event in history that must never be forgotten. ****.