The Geisha Boy

Jerry Lewis was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars back in August, and TCM ran quite a few of his films that I had not seen before and weren't on my Jerry Lewis box set that I've gone through over the past several years. I think I finished up that set when I posted on The Nutty Professor since that one was on the TCM schedule. The upshot is that I've got a fair amount of Lewis' work to get through over the next several months before the stuff expires from the YouTube TV DVR. But even before that, I noticed that I had a different Lewis movie that aired on TCM previously and was not reused for the Summer Under the Stars block: The Geisha Boy, which showed up when Sessue Hayakawa was Star of the Month in May.

Jerry Lewis stars as Gilbert Wooley, a failed musician who hasn't worked in months but has a rabbit, Harry, who's the star of the show. Gilbert and Harry show up at the airport in Los Angeles because they've been booked as part of a USO tour of Japan that's being headlined by actress Lola Livingston (Marie McDonald). Wooley and Lola immediately do the exact opposite of hitting it off, as Harry agitates Lola's dog to the point that the military orders the dog to stay behind as part of its no pets policy. Then, on the flight, Wooley keeps causing trouble as part of his attempts to keep everybody from finding out about the existence of Harry. The only person who seems to have any sympathy for Wooley is stewardess Sgt. Pearson (Suzanne Pleshette in one of her earliest roles).

When the plane lands in Tokyo, Wolley screws up Lola's PR reveal so badly that Lola uses her influence as headliner to get Wooley kicked off the tour. But Wooley also developed an ally as a result of his physical comedy failures. Maj. Ridgely (Barton MacLane), the organizer of the tour, doesn't speak Japnese, and needs an interpreter, which he's given in the form of Kimi Sikita. She's also the guardian of her nephew, Mitsuo, as his parents died tragically some time back and Mitsuo hasn't gotten over it. Until now, as Wooley's antics cause Mitsuo to smile and laugh for the first time in ages.

So Wooley now has a little boy who looks up to him, and a woman who in a normal movie would become a love interest. But this is a Jerry Lewis film, so you know it's going to be more about the sight gags than about a wholly coherent plot. And in any case, Kimi also has a boyfriend, or at least someone she's "supposed" to marry, that being the star pitcher on one of the the local baseball teams. This subplot is never fully realized but is used to set up a scene of an exhibition game between the Japanese team and the Dodgers who had literally just moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

Eventually the time comes for Wooley to return to America, but little Mitsuo doesn't want Wooley to leave. Mitsuo is willing to create an international incident to deal with his plight, although that incident leads to the requisite happy ending for all the right characters.

As I've strongly implied above, The Geisha Boy is another of Jerry Lewis' movies that's much stronger in the sight gag and physical comedy departments than it is in the area of a good story. Indeed, the whole idea of the "clash of cultures" is one where it's easy to see people getting humor from, while at the same time running a serious risk of greatly offending people if it isn't handled well. Thankfully, most of the movie is on the side that doesn't play to the stereotypes, although I found the baseball game scene poorly handled. As for Hayakawa, he plays Kimi's father, and gets a sight gag of his own when he's directing a bunch of men in his backyard garden pond to build a bridge that looks suspiciously like the one on the river Kwai.

The Geisha Boy didn't get the best reception, and watching it, it's easy to see why this of Lewis' films is so little remembered. There are some fun sight gags here, but that's not enough to sustain an entire movie.

Remembering Alain Delon

French actor Alain Delon died a few months back, and I don't think that TCM had a traditional programming tribute to him. One of his movies is on my DVR and on TCM soon, so I decided to watch it: Le Samouraï, tomorrow (October 17) at 6:00 AM.

Delon plays Jef [sic] Costello, and as the movie opens he's in one of those crappy apartments in Paris of a sort similar to those that seemed to populate American noir movies as well as a lot of European films where the housing stock was older and much worse, living there with just a bird for a pet. He exits the apartment and gets into a Citroën parked along the street, where he pulls out a ring of keys and tests each of them in the ignition. He finally finds one that starts the car, stealing it and taking it to a place that changes the license plate for him. Jef then goes to the apartment of his girlfriend Jane (Delon's then wife Nathalie), asking her to come up with an airtight alibi for him. After this, he goes to a nightclub called Martey's, goes to the office to see Martey, and shoots Martey dead!

However, quite a few people saw Jef as he entered and exited the club. Worse, Jef is stupid enough that he always wears the same hat, which seems like it would be a pretty big giveaway to the police. They, in the form of the Commissar (François Périer), investigate the case, rounding up the usual suspects. Unsurprisingly, Jef is one of those suspects, since he's been well known to the police for ages. A lot of what follows over the remainder of the movie is not quite a police procedural, but a decided cat-and-mouse game as the police, suspecting Jef, try to tail him. Jef, for his part, tries to give the police the slip as much as possible.

Jef also has good reason for that. He hasn't been paid off for his side of the contract killing yet. He goes to what in America would be an el train overpass to meet Olivier, the man responsible for fulfilling the contract from that end and paying Jef. Instead of a cash payoff, however, Olivier tries to kill Jef, only giving Jef a wound in the left forearm. At least some people however, will have noticed that Jef has been shot and doesn't have full use of his left arm any more.

Meanwhile, the club's pianist (Caty Rosier) saw Jef enter and leave Martey's, so was naturally called in by the police. Surprisingly, however, she lies about Jef's identity. Jef starts to put two and two together, realizing that she knows something about who the people above Olivier responsible for hiring him are. They want him dead, figuring that if the police do get him he might be able to tell the police something about who the people behind Jef are. Best to get Jef out of the way for good.

Now, this synopsis probably makes Le Samouraï sound like a dry film. But it's actually quite good. There's violence and some action, although the pace is not exactly fast. That, however, works in favor of a movie like this, building up the tension. It also felt to me like there was rather less dialog, again, something that's to the movie's benefit.

Le Samouraï feels like it could fit in well with American noir films, only with a certain French flair of its own, making it the sort of foreign-language film easier for those who aren't particularly into reading subtitles -- and definitely not wanting to deal with arthouse stuff -- to sink their teeth into. If you haven't seen it before, don't miss this TCM airing.

Tess

The next movie that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM is Tess. As of this writing, it's going to be on overnight tonight at 2:45 AM, so still late in the evening of October 15 out on the west coast.

Tess is a film version of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles Nastassja Kinski plays Tess, a young woman in England of the 1880s. She's the eldest daughter in a poor rural family named Durbeyfield, with a father who is an alcoholic. Dad is walking along a country road when the local vicar rides by, referring to him as "Sir John". It turns out that the parson has been doing some research, and has determined that the Derbyfields are actually descended from a nobleman who came over as part of the Norman conquest in 1066, the d'Urbervilles. Their particular line, however, fell into poverty due to the death of male heirs and, I'd guess, not being the eldest son in a line.

The parson also knows that there's a family of d'Urbervilles a town or two over, and that this particular line is rather well to do. So Tess' parents get the idea that Tess should introduce herself, and perhaps the d'Urbervilles might be able to help the Durbeyfields in some way. Yeah, is seems rather like a grift to me. But Tess goes along with it, in part probably because it's at least a chance at a better life.

Tess doesn't meet the matriarch of the family, but instead the matriarch's son, Alec d'Urberville (Leigh Lawson). He's intrigued by the idea of country cousins, but much more by Tess' beauty, with him and Mom eventually giving Tess a trial job as manager of the manor's poultry. It also transpires that Alec is not a real d'Urberville, having simply bought the name and coat of arms because he was from a working class family but worked his way up to prosperity and wanted a good name to go with that prosperity.

Alec also has the hots for Tess so seduces her, and eventually rapes her, knocking her up in the process. Tess is horrified and returns home, but doesn't take care of herself, and the child dies as an infant. Tess goes off again to try to escape her life, getting a job as a dairy maid. It's there that she meets Angel Clare (Peter Firth), a farmer who's hoping to grow his business as well. He falls in love with Tess, and eventually decides to ask for her hand in marriage even though his mom would prefer a better marriage for her.

It's only after the wedding that Tess decides to tell Angel about her background, specifically the having been raped and impregnated part. This being the Victorian era, that really ticks Angel off, with his thinking it's somehow Tess' fault. The two still kinda-sorta love each other, but for whatever reason Angel thinks they can no longer live together for the time being. He's going to go off to find himself, eventually coming back when he does after a long sojourn in Brazil of all places.

Tess, needing some form of support, decides to go back to Alec, which is why Angel has trouble finding Tess when he returns to England. And once Angel returns, Tess finds that perhaps having chosen to live with Alec wasn't such a good move. Not like she had anyone else to go to, however, since Dad finally died and the rest of her family became part of the indigent itinerants as a result. But Angel's return ultimately leads to tragedy....

I had never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, so I didn't know what a mess it was in terms of plotting. That's partly because the novel was originally serialized. But in any case it's a sprawling story. Director Roman Polanski also wrote the screenplay for this adaptation, and he didn't bother to edit it down into a manageable length, so we get a story here that's fairly slow and all over the place. The technical parts of the movie -- the cinematography and production design -- however, are quite good, and both won Oscars.

Roman Polanski's original edit of the movie was a shade over three hours. The version that TCM ran in 31 Days of Oscar was a restoration from the early 2010s, and runs 172 minutes. However, as I write TCM only has the movie in a 165-minute block; the following presentation, an episode of MGM Parade, is set for 5:30 AM and runs 25 minutes in a half-hour block. The previous film, A Room With a View, is 117 minutes and starts at 12:30 AM. If A Room With a View were on during weekday daytime, TCM could conceivably put it in a two-hour block. But since this is part of a prime-time block, there's an intro and an outro, which would make it run past 2:30 AM if you wanted to put Tess in a three-hour block starting at 2:30 AM. By the time this actually posts, however, things may have changed.

Neptune's Daughter

Once again, I've hit a period where there are multiple movies on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before but that are coming up soon on TCM, so you're going to get a bunch of such posts in quick succession. First up is Neptune's Daughter, which concludes a night of Ricardo Montalbán movies early tomorrow (October 15) morning at 4:00 AM.

Montalbán is the male lead here, although the star of the movie is Esther Williams. She plays Eve Barrett, a swimmer who wins a bunch of trophies in the days when you couldn't make money from a competitive sport like swimming since the International Olympic Committee highly frowned on that. So, needing to make money, Eve went into business designing swimsuits with Joe Backett (Keenan Wynn). Joe has a thing for Eve, but for her there's a business partnership and just a friendship.

Eve has a kid sister, Betty (Betty Garrett). Betty is man-hungry, so when news comes that a South American polo team is going to be visiting, Betty gets excited. Joe is excited by the idea of putting on an aquacade for the team and all the audience that will show up for the matches to make some money and serve as advertising for the swimwear company. Eve, however, is not excited, because she knows that poor Betty will go after the guys and possibly get herself in troube for it.

The star of the polo team is José O'Rourke (that's Montalbán, of course). He, being a performance athlete, gets a lot of the aches and pains that high-level athletes do, and needs a masseur. He gets on in Jack Spratt (Red Skelton), and gives Jack some advice on Latin lovers and that the reason Anglo women go for them is that apparently they find Spanish irresistible. José leaves, Betty walks in, and since Jack is practicing his Spanish, Betty immediately assumes this is José. As if Red Skelton could look even remotely Latin.

The real José shows up at Joe and Eve's factory, which gives Eve the chance to speak her piece to José, telling him to stop seeing Betty, even though he never has met Betty. So instead, José takes this as an opportunity to start putting the moves on Eve, who does after all look good in a swimsuit. Eve tries to rebuff José at first, but you know she's going to fall for him despite the mistaken identities that will need to be resolved.

And then out of nowhere the plot takes a ridiculous turn. Mac (Mike Mazurki) is a professional gambler who has a wager on the outcome of the big polo match, and figures the best way to hedge his bets is to try to waylay José, by less than legal means if necessary. This has an affect on both the José and Eve relationship, as well as on Jack, since of course with Red Skelton in the film you're going to get some of his physical comedy.

The plot of Neptune's Daughter is wafer-thin, but that's not the reason to watch the movie. The real reason is that all of the main leads are so appealing here in spite of the plot. Betty Garrett and Red Skelton get the better musical numbers, including one with Xavier Cugat. Among the songs is one that's now become a Christmas standard, "Baby It's Cold Outside", although Neptune's Daughter has nothing to do with Christmas. The song is also done twice, once with Esther Williams not able to stay and Montalbán telling her it's cold -- and a second time with the sex roles reversed, and Red Skelton feigning wanting to leave with Betty Garrett trying to convince him to stay. Also, all four of the characters have their eyes fully open about what they're doing. So this Christmas if anybody tries to claim that "Baby It's Cold Outside" is "problematic", tell them to go fuck themselves.

Rant aside, Neptune's Daughter is a decidedly entertaining movie, if one that's fairly mindless.

The Belle of Broadway

I think I mentioned the last time I did a silent movie, back on Silent Movie Day a few weeks back, that I have a fairly substantial backlog of silent films to get through, like with foreign films, so it means those two genres are going to show up a bit more often than they normally do. Up next is a silent from Columbia that I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Belle of Broadway.

Oddly enough, Broadway really has precious little to do with the movie, other than the fact that one of the two main characters supposedly starred on Broadway in her youth. That character is Mme. Adèle. As the movie opens, it's 1896 in Paris, and Adèle (played here by Betty Compson) is the toast of the Paris stage, playing her most celebrated role, Madame du Barry, who was the last mistress of French King Louis XV in the 1760s and 1770s. Adèle has all sorts of men swooning over her, such as Count Raoul. However, she's also got a husband Fabio, who is set up in the orchestra box and can see all of the men who are not Mr. Adèle like he is trying to woo her. Fabio decides he's had enough of this, and leaves his wife. Worse for her, however, is that he also takes their infant son with him.

Fast forward to the present day, or at least 1926 when the movie was made. Adèle has, like everyone else, grown 30 years older. Acting is, for women, the same as it's always been: a profession where the audience wants young, beautiful things. Adèle (now played by Edith Yorke) is pushing 60, and looking like a woman of 60. Not terrible by any means, but no longer what the audience generally wants in a leading role. The stage producers can no longer find any good roles for her.

Living in the same building as Adèle is young Marie Duval (that's Betty Compson again, so you can guess where the movie is going). She's walking along the sidewalks of Paris on a rainy day when she gets her shoe stuck in a mud puddle. A kind young man named Paul (Herbert Rawlinson) rescues her from her predicament and takes her home. It's at this point that Marie and Adèle finally meet, and Adèle notices the similarity between her younger self when she was playing Mme. du Barry, and Marie. This is also where the plot starts getting ridiculous.

Adèle and the people close to her decide that they could give Marie her big break. But, it would come as Marie pretening to be Adèle, having been rejuvenated by all sorts of plastic surgery and other fountain of youth-type treatments that as I understand it were the rage in the 1920s when the movie was made. Marie goes on stage, and all those suitors Adèle had 30 years prior come out of the woodwork despite the fact that they're now lecherous sexagenarians, The Thin Man joke about the meaning of sexagenarian aside. Marie obviously doesn't remember these people, but they remember who they think she is, and are going to put her in compromising situations.

But if that's not bad enough, the plot is going to get even more ridiculous. Paul, the man who saved Marie from the mud and brought her home, is actually the son of Fabio and Adèle. Dad died when Paul was a kid, and he obviously never met his biological mother. So by going out with Marie who is trying to pass herself off as Adèle, the suitors would consider this an incestuous relationship.

The plot of The Belle of Broadway gets ridiculous in the latter half of its brief running time, but the movie is still a fun one. Granted, if I were trying to introduce people to silent film, this isn't the one I'd pick, but for people who are already fans of the genre, I'd absolutely recommend it.

India from a passage

I've mentioned quite a few times before in passing the "Blind Spot" blogathon, where the point is to select a dozen "essential" movies you haven't actually seen, and blog about them over the course of a year. I've never taken part it it, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over the course of the following year, and whether movies that are one of my blind spots are going to show up on TV for me to watch. In any case, a movie that had been one of my "blind spots" was David Lean's A Passage to India, which TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar and which I finally watched.

Judy Davis plays Adela Quested, a young woman in 1920s England. As the movie opens, she's booking passage to India, together with a much older traveling companion, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft). Mrs. Moore has a son, Ronny, who's part of the British administration, and Adela is set to marry Ronny at some point in the future. Mrs. Moore books a round trip, but Adela only books one way, as she is uncertain when she's going to come back.

Adela and Mrs. Moore get to India, where they find that the British have mostly tried to bring a piece of Britain to India, living as rich feudal lords and using the local Indians as hired help. Some of the local Indians, however, are taking the opportunity to get into the good graces of the British colonial authority, from where they'll try to agitate for independence. One example is the widower Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), whom we first see being very obsequious to a British school headmaster, Fielding (James Fox).

Fielding is a bit different from the other British in that, while he certainly hasn't gone native, seems to have more sympathy towards the Indians. And, of course, they certainly have legitimate grievances. Fielding even has a friend in the form of the guru/scholar Godbole (Alec Guinness), whose presence in the film seems to serve the purpose of being the detached person who can look at events from both sides and with the view of someone never directly involved.

It's through Fielding that Adela is introduced to Dr. Aziz, which Adela is happy for as she doesn't want to be part of an insular British community. Aziz, ever eager to do the needful and curry favor with the British, takes Adela and Mrs. Moore on a tourist excursion to some local caves.

But something happens in the caves, something that's never made quite clear. Adela seemingly gets separated from Aziz in the relatively dark cave, before running out of the cave, down the hill, and winding up terribly bloodied. But what actually happened? To save her honor, Adela says that Aziz attempted to rape her. (I think the plot would make a bit more sense if Adela had accused the local guide, who may or may not have met up with her again after being separated.) The rape trial becomes a sensation as the local Indians start showing their nascent political awakening. At the same time, however, they feel like they can't really get justice from British courts, who are always going to stand with one of their own.

A Passage to India is a visually beautiful movie, largely because director David Lean did a lot of location shooting and had access to very lovely places to film. The movie is also well acted, although 40 years on some people will argue whether Alec Guinness should have been playing a non-British character. The movie, however, runs at a very leisurely pace, lasting 163 minutes for what really isn't all that much story. Some people may find it a bit too slow.

Overall, however, it's easy to see why critics and the Oscars loved A Passage to India, ad why it generally gets positive reviews to this day. It's definitely worth a watch if you can block out the 160-plus minutes it lasts.

A Global Affair

Bob Hope's movie career really tailed off sometime around 1960, as he made one subpar comedy after another. An example of this that showed up on TCM some time back is A Global Affair.

A Global Affair is one of those 1960s films that opens with a terribly dated MOR song. After that, Lisette (Michèle Mercier) is leading a tour of the United Nations building. Just at the end of the tour, she discovers that sombody has abandoned a baby in the building! There's a note attached to the baby, and when Lisette takes the baby to the boss, it's revealed that the mother left the baby there after having heard the radio speeches delivered by UN official Frank Larrimore (Bob Hope).

Now, it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to call the local authorities both to help find the biological mother as well as to find someone suitable to take care of the baby. But the UN building is technically sovereign territory, or at least not US territory, and the UN jealously guards its jurisdiction, so they're not about to call the New York police. Instead, they give the baby to Frank for him to take care of until they can find a suitable solution. Of course, that comes with its own set of problems.

Frank is a bachelor, so there's no woman to be the mother of the child. And then there's the fact that he lives in an apartment building that's for the childless, and having a child would break the lease. Frank calls in his friend Randy (Robert Sterling), and he invited a bunch of nubile young women over, theoretically in the hopes that a suitable mother can be found, but more because Randy is just into beautiful young women. Lisette sees the party going on, and she's pissed.

The next day when Frank takes the baby to the UN building on his way to work, the subject of what to do with the baby is discussed. Segura (Nehemiah Persoff), the delegate from Peru, rightly realizes that the baby is liable to cause an international incident, although he does admire the things Frank has had to say about children's rights. So Frank can keep the baby a little while longer until a decision is reached.

The eventual idea is for all the member states of the UN to put forward proposals as to why they'd be the best place for the kid, and somehow somebody will make the right choice about which country gets the child. At the same time, the Soviets send over a pediatric researcher, Sonya (Lilo Pulver), to research the kid.

A Global Affair goes on like this, combining unfunny humor with a large dollop of UN propaganda. Thankfully, it only runs for a brief 84 minutes. Some people may like A Global Affair, but I'd rather recommend Bob Hope's earlier movies.

The Pride of the Yankees

We're into the baseball playoffs now, and I don't think that I've done a post on a baseball movie in a while, so it's time to watch one that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar: The Pride of the Yankees.

The Pride of the Yankees is, actually, a bit tough to do a good full-length post on, in part because most people are already going to know the story. Lou Gehrig (played here by Gary Cooper) was the son of German immigrants who found baseball as a kid and played professionally after college, eventually making it to the big leagues on the big team of the day, the New York Yankees. When he made it into the lineup, he didn't give up his spot, playing every game for nearly 14 seasons, until... he was diagnosed with ALS, which is still commonly referred to in the US as "Lou Gehrig's disease".

Complicating matters is that apparently Gehrig wasn't the most exciting person. Not that I mean this in a bad way; it's more that he was clean enough that he didn't get himself involved in the sorts of things that made, say, his teammate Babe Ruth (who plays himself) a larger-than-life figure. (Or, in a later Yankees generation, someone like Mickey Mantle.) In short, Gehrig's life seems relatively cinematically boring. There's no real plot conflict here of the sort that might drive other Hollywood biopics.

So the scriptwriters have to try to create something, which here is a conflict between baseball and family, if you will. A young Gehrig is seen finding a sandlot game at the opening of the film, and we pretty quickly get to Gehrig's college days at Columbia. His parents (played by Elsa Janssen and Ludwig Stossel), like a lot of immigrant parents, want him to go into something professional, much like his unseen uncle Otto did, becoming an engineer. Mom for the longest time can't understand why her son loves baseball.

There's another conflict, which isn't really that much of one, involving Gehrig's devotion to his mother and the fact that, well, he's going to grow up and find a woman to be his wife. That woman is Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), a Chicago socialite who first sees Gehrig when he's in town to play the White Sox. He trips over a bat and she calls him "Tanglefoot". They eventually meet again and ultimately get married, with Eleanor scrapbooking Lou's career. After his retirement and young death, she would preserve and safeguard his legacy until her own death; she never had children and never remarried.

If you haven't noticed, there's actually precious little baseball action in the movie, as a lot of it is done with montages and shots of pennants with the different American League cities on them. There's also a subplot about two sportswriters with opposite views of how to cover the players. Sam (Walter Brennan) is more protective of Lou and one of his best non-baseball friends, while Hank (Dan Duryea), while not an iconoclast, doesn't seem to want to be a hagiographer.

The acting in The Pride of the Yankees is all well done; the problem with the movie is that there's just not a dynamic story to be told from the material. And certainly not one that runs over two hours. Still, The Pride of the Yankees is a beloved movie, probably in part because of Gehrig's tragic story. So definitely it's worth a watch.

Briefs for October 9-10, 2024

I probably should have mentioned when I did the post on Star of the Month Bela Lugosi last Wednesday that among his movies is Zombies on Broadway, which I did a brief post on back in October 2010. It's showing up in a few hours, tonight at 9:30 PM. Apologies for not mentioning it sooner. But I assume it's going to be on the Watch TCM app, since it's an RKO movie.

Over on FXM, October 1 did bring a few films out of the vault, although much of what's new is stuff I've already blogged about. Desiree, which was the subject of a post five years ago, showed up today; it's actually showing up on TCM later this month. The Barbarian and the Geisha is another on that's back and ran today, although it's not on in the next two weeks. One that is is As Young As You Feel, an early 50s movie about forced retirement, which you can see at 4:40 AM Saturday. That's immediately follows one of the few movies in the rotation I haven't blogged about, Only the Strong. That one seems to have several airings, although I don't know exactly which one will get the post on it, since I've got enough other stuff on TCM that's also on my DVR to blog about and I'm already ahead through almost the end of October in terms of posts scheduled on the blog.

Today was the birth anniversary of Jacques Tati, who was born on this day in 1907. Tati is probably best known for M. Hulot's Holiday, although I've also blogged about Mon Oncle before.

I just don't get Albert Brooks

I reveiwed the movie Lost in America some months back, and found it not as good as a lot of the critics seem to think it is. Then, on one of the movie channels on I think PlutoTV, I saw another of Albert Brooks' films show up: Modern Romance. I gave up on this one after maybe a half hour because it just wasn't funny. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch my recording of Albert Brooks' directorial debut, Real Life.

Albert Brooks got the idea for this from an early 1970s PBS documentary series, An American Family, which focused on a real family in California. Apparently, the family's consent to having PBS come in and record a whole lot of their personal interactions had a profound effect on the family, and not for the better. In Real Life, Brooks plays a documentary filmmaker named Albert Brooks, contending that his new film is about to change forever what film can be, as it's going to show real life.

The movie starts off with Brooks leading a press conference in the rapidly-growing metropolis of Phoenix, AZ (the city population at the time is about half what is is today while the metropolitan area is three times the size it was hen the movie was made). Brooks and his crew are announcing that they've picked a family from Phoenix to do their documentary on "real life" about; the family isn't introduced because they've been sent on vacation to give the crew time to prepare. Brooks concludes the conference with a song that makes no sense but you get the sense Brooks thought people would find funny.

We then get an extended back story about the Institute for Human Behavior and how they conceived a study and picked the family, as well as all the pseudoscientific stuff that's going to go into making a documentary like this about a family. As for Brooks himself, he buys a house across the street from the selected family, the Yeagers, in order to set up shop. He's working with a psychologist, Dr. Cleary, while having regular contact with the researchers from the Institute as their experiment is supposed to run an entire year.

Needless to say, the experiment doesn't go as planned. On the Yeagers' first night back, Mrs. Yeager seems depressed, and decides that she's going to have the implanted birth-control device removed. Eventually she calls Brooks, who decides to take the totally unprofessional step of having a "private" (well, with cameras in tow) conversation with her, convincing her to let the cameras in on the appointment with her gynecologist, who, in turn, was the subject of a 60 Minutes exposé some years prior.

As for Mr. Yeager (Charles Grodin), he's a veterinarian who seems to have started off more positive about the idea of the documentary. But his wife's depression has a strain on him, as he accidentally ODs a horse during surgery, killing the horse and leaving him depressed for several weeks. Things continue to spiral out of control, with matters finally coming to a head when local news figures out (really? It took them this long?) what family is being filmed and starts following the family themselves.

Surprisingly, for once I'm in agreement with Roger Ebert about a movie. He really hated Real Life, and I didn't care for it either. It's supposed to be a mockumentary, which implies comedy. But most of the comedy doesn't work. Brooks' character is also terribly self-centered and obnoxious, starting with that song in the opening scene. The script also fails in that Brooks seems to have had no idea how to resolve the conflict at the heart of the movie. There's also a race-relations scene between him and the Dr. Cleary character that brings the movie to a screeching halt.

But, as I implied at the beginning, there are people who really seem to love Brooks' films, not that he directed that many. So if you liked Lost in America, you might be the sort of person who will like Real Life.