The Gull

With me already having written one post for today, my next post is going to be a bit briefer of a review than normal, although that's also in part because it's a movie based on a classic work of literature: a 1968 international production of The Sea Gull.

The movie is of course based on the play by Anton Chekhov, which probably should have been originally translated as just The Gull since the movie isn't set anywhere near the sea. Instead, it's set at a country estate somewhere not far south of Moscow where bureaucrat Sorin lives. His sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret) visits; she's a successful actress whose son Konstantin (David Warner) would like to be a writer but is writing more daring stuff that the public doesn't care for.

More successful with the public is Trigorin (James Mason), but he doesn't much care for the sort of stuff that sells commercially; he's also carrying on an affair with Arkadina. And then, living over on the next estate, is young Nina (Vanessa Redgrave). Konstantin has been pursuing her, but she meets someone successful like Trigorian and she's immediately smitten with that achievement. The various characters see each other and philosophize a lot, to the point that the whole proceedings get boring.

Eventually, it comes time for everyone not living in the area to go home, except that Nina goes off with Trigorin to become his mistress. Two years pass, and most of the same characters return to Sorin's estate because he's getting to the age where everybody expects him to die soon. There's more philosophizing, and then an ending that's a bit shocking.

Apparently the first performance of the play back in the 1890s was a critical failure and it wasn't until a few years later when a new production was an artistic breakthrough. I'd never seen any version of the play, nor read it, before seeing this version of the movie. All I can say is that having seen this movie, I can understand why the original stage play was a failure. The one thing that the movie has going for it is the settings; the movie was filmed in Sweden with lake areas just outside Stockholm substituting for country Russia, and doing so rather beautifully.

However, I think Signoret is miscast as a Russian actress, while director Sidney Lumet didn't do anything particularly imaginative in the direction. The actors mostly declaim their lines, as if they're not on screen together, and since the movie is slow and talky, none of this really helps the production.

Northern gothic

Katharine Hepburn has been TCM's Star of the Month this month, which gave me the chance to record one or two of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these was the adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night.

The play deals with the Tyrone family, and one day in their life in the summer of 1912. The story is loosely based on Eugene O'Neill's own family, and set at a time when he would have been in his mid 20s. Here, that character is the younger brother Edmund, played by Dean Stockwell. Edmund has spent his adult life trying to escape the long shadow of his family, mostly doing so by becoming a merchant marine. He's recently returned home to the family's summer place in Connecticut, and there's some worry that his persistent cough is in fact tuberculosis, often referred to in those days as consumption.

Hepburn plays Edmund's mother Mary; she doesn't want to hear of her son having consumption. Understanding this and trying to protect Mary is dad James Sr. (Ralph Richardson). He was a stage actor who's reaching the age where he should retire and try to live off his savings. Not as though an actor can have that much savings, so he's always trying to save a few dollars wherever he can. This is another source of rancor between various pairs of family members, as it also leads to Dad's distrust of doctors that may have consequences for Edmund, and definitely already did for Mary.

Part of Mary's backstory is that she had a difficult pregnancy with Edmund and the postpartum issues nearly killed her; as a result she was prescribed morphine. The only thing is that she got herself addicted to the morphine, and the rest of the family is dancing around that fact trying to keep her off the drug while she thinks (not entirely wrongly) that the rest of the family is spying on her.

And then there's elder brother Jamie (Jason Robards), who is enough older than Edmund that he's had a much more mature look at the breakdown of the family and how each parent's different view of the two sons has also caused all sorts of problems with the brothers' relationships with their parents along with the two brothers' relationship with each other. So there's a lot of pent-up resentment here and opportunity for them finally to get all that resentment off their chests.

And boy do they spend a lot of time getting that resentment off their chests. They talk, and talk and talk some more, and when they're done talking, well, they're never done talking and getting to -- and going past -- the point of no longer caring whether they piss off the rest of the family by revealing uncomfortable truths.

It's that talkiness -- and director Sidney Lumet decidedly felt that the original play should be edited as little as possible for the movie -- that may make the movie a tough slog for many viewers. It goes on for well over two and a half hours, and the characters are, like the ones in Sweetie, not particularly sympathetic. If you know that going in, and you're up for a movie that's more of a master-class in acting, then you'll probably highly enjoy this adaptation of Long Day's Journey Into Night. If that's not your thing, then consider this review a warning.

Did you live in New York in the 1960s?

Another of the movies that I recorded because of its interesting synopsis was Bye Bye Braverman. I had seen a review or two before watching it that indicated the movie had sharply divided opinions on it, and now that I've watched it, I can see why.

Morroe Rieff (George Segal) is a Jewish PR man living with his wife (Zohra Lampert) in an apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. One day, he gets a phone call from Inez Braverman (Jessica Walter) informing him that her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at the tender age of 41. Jewish tradition has it that the funeral is supposed to take place as soon as is practical (I'd guess that thousands of years ago, in the desert without any form of preservation, it was important to bury bodies as quickly as possible, and making that a religious commandment would make it more likely that people keep following it), so Mrs. Braverman informs Rieff that the funeral is going to be later that day, in a funeral home out in Brooklyn on Ocean Parkway. You can't miss the place.

Of course, you can miss the place, but we're getting ahead of ourselves in the story. Morroe calls some of his best friends, those who were mutual friends with Braverman. They hail from different parts of Manhattan, but agree to go to the funeral together. Those friends are, like Braverman, all intellectuals of a sort: Weinstein (Jack Warden), an academic writer; Ottensteen (Joseph Wiseman), a writer of fiction; and Holly Levine (Sorrell Booke), who writes book reviews. Holly is the one with a car, a practical -- but German (gasp!) -- Volkswagen Beetle, so the four men will all load themselves into his car for the drive to Brooklyn.

Of course, the drive to the funeral is not uneventful. There's a lot of the pseudo-intellectual banter you might expect from four white-collar men, punctuated by Holly's annoyance at having a bunch of back-seat drivers. More noteworthy would be a fender-bender they get into with a taxi driver (Godfrey Cambridge), who turns out to be a black Jew and, despite his driving a taxi, being as much of a pseudo-intellectual as the rest of them.

Eventually they get to a funeral home, where the rabbi (Alan King) is delivering a long-winded and equally pseudo-intellectual sermon. Of course, the point of all this, at least in terms of the movie's entertainment value, is that the posturing is supposed to be funny and lead to a reflection on life.

Now, whether or not you get that humor depends, I think, on how much you can identify with the characters and their milieu. I'm not Jewish and I'm also not an urbanite, so I have to admit that I didn't identify with them to the extent that people who like this movie do. I can see why some people would, and I can certainly see why director Sidney Lumet would have been attracted to the material, since his father was part of the Yiddish theater in New York back in the 1920s and 1930s. Other people, however, may find it a slog.

So Bye Bye Braverman is more than a lot of others the sort of thing where you have to watch and draw your own judgment.

The Group

For the past several years, TCM has taken one night in December to honor some people who died over the past year but who weren't big enough to merit a regular programming tribute. One of those honorees for 2021 was Jessica Walter, who was part of the large ensemble cast of The Group. I hadn't seen it before, so I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie starts off in 1933 with commencement at Vassar (or maybe a Vassar-like women-only college), and eight young women who became friends over their four years in college graduating together. Over the course of the next 150 minutes or so, the movie will look at the life of the group, as well as the lives of the individuals in it, up until about the spring of 1940 when Hitler's army overran France. The movie's opening credits introduces the eight women in the group alphabetically by surname of the actress playing each woman, so that's how I'll do a brief one- or two-line synopsis introducing each of the women:

Candice Bergen plays Lakey, who studied art history and leaves for Europe not long after graduating, studying art in Vienna until coming home just in time to escape the Nazis and the start of World War II in Europe. She's got a surprise for everyone when she comes home.
Joan Hackett is Dottie, who is also out of a good portion of the movie, as she marries a wealthy businessman out in Arizona and moves west as well as spending time in Bermuda. She does return for the ending, however.
Elizabeth Hartman is Priss, who at the start of the movie is an ardent supporter of the New Deal and works in Washington before marrying a doctor (James Congdon) who wants her to have children, and then insists she breastfeed when she finally does have a child.
Shirley Knight plays Polly, who studied chemistry with a view to becoming a doctor, only becoming a hospital nurse/lab tech instead. However, she too winds up with a doctor, a psychiatrist (James Broderick) who is able to help her take care of her manic father (Robert Emhardt).
Joanna Pettet is Kay, who apparently came from a bit more modest means, only to marry right out of college as she weds never-quite-successful playwright Harald (Larry Hagman), who drinks way too much and has affairs with other women, which plays havoc with Kay's mental health.
Mary-Robin Redd plays Pokey, who seems to keep having twins, much to the other women's shock.
Jessica Walter is Libby, the gossip of the group, who hopes to become a published author but doesn't seem to succeed. Walter, however, gets to be extremely catty in the role.
Finally, there's Helena (Kathleen Widdoes), an artist who writes the group newsletter.

As you can see, with eight "main" characters, it's hard to come up with a movie that doesn't really underuse some of them. Kay, Priss, and Polly get a disproportionate amount of the screen time, with Polly's story probably being the best because the three main characters in it (her, her husband, and her father) are all more likable.

In fact, I found myself thinking that a film, even one at 150 minutes, wasn't the right format for this story, which was based on a novel by Mary McCarthy (sister of Kevin from Invasion of the Body Snatchers who got in a lawsuit with Lillian Hellman over the movie Julia; as McCarthy said of Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.") who herself graduated from Vassar. I haven't read the book, but as I was watching the movie I thought that it would probably work better as a 70s/80s-style miniseries (not that TV was doing this back in the day), or as one of today's "limited" series that's only intended to run for one season.

As things stand in the movie, it's confusing for long stretches of the beginning of the movie to keep track of who is who, and who is having an affair with whom, since someone like the publisher played by Hal Holbrook is a major part of two character's story lines. It's also difficult to like a lot of these characters, who seem about as vapid and selfish as the characters in The Women.

Some people will definitely be interested in seeing some of these stars early in their careers, but be warned that the movie is not without some serious flaws.

The Verdict (1982)

A movie that I'd always wanted to get around to watching so that I could do a blog post on it is the Paul Newman film The Verdict. (There's another film from the 1940s with the same name but a different plot.) Anyhow, the Paul Newman movie was on TCM early this year, so I made a point of recording it to eventually watch it and do that post.

Newman plays Frank Galvin, a Boston attorney who is way past his prime. Not only that, but he's turned to drink, spending his day looking at the obituaries and going to the vieweing hours of those deceased who might be a suitable candidate for a wrongful death lawsuit, something that obviously pisses off the bereaved who understand what's going on with Galvin. But then fate intervenes and throws a big case right into his lap.

Deborah Ann Kaye was a young wife, nine months pregnant, who had a problem delivery that necessitated a Caesarian section. But while under anesthesia, she aspirated some of her food, which resulted in heart stoppage and brain damage. Kaye survived, but it in a permanent vegetative state. Deborah's sister Sally Doneghy (Roxanne Hart) and her husband Kevin (James Handy) would like a settlement from the Archdiocese of Boston, since they run the hospital where the botched operation was performed.

Meanwhile, the Archdiocese just wants to have the case be handled quietly so that nobody finds out what happens. Bishop Brophy (Edward Binns) has a high-powered law firm at his disposal, led by Ed Concannon (James Mason). They offer the Doneghys a substantial settlement, and since Galvin is taking the case on a contingency basis, he'd get a third of that, which would leave him financially secure for at least several years.

At this point, Frank does something that should probably be considered legal malpractice: as far as we can see, Frank doesn't tell the Doneghys about the settlement, considering that they're not in the room for the proposal and Kevin gets mighty pissed on finding out about it later in the movie. Frank figures the Archdiocese must be hiding something; further, since this is probably his last big chance, he's going to go looking for justice, with a little help from a former law partner now retired, Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden).

Galvin's personal life may be about to take a turn for the better, too. One day at the bar, he meets Laura Fischer (Charlotte Rampling), new to Boston and looking for an apartment. Galvin runs into her the next day, too, and so decides to take him back his apartment to see if there's anything more to the possible relationship. She winds up working as a sort of secretary, always being around Galvin and Morrissey.

The defense side of the case isn't about to give up, and Kincannon is trying to shut down every last possible angle of attack that Galvin might be able to come up with. And with an entire firm at his disposal, he's got a lot of people who can investigate Galvin's comings and goings and possible witnesses, something that continually frustrates Galvin. Further frustrating him is the judge, Hoyle (Milo O'Shea), who seems consistently on the side of the defendant, to the point that Galvin would probably have reasonable grounds for a mistrial or a change of judge. The judge asking leading questions to one of Galvin's expert witnesses certainly seemed off to me.

The case proceeds all the way through the trial and with a jury verdict, and you can probably guess how that's going to go. The Verdict is only partly about the trial, and much more a character study of Frank Galvin. Paul Newman is excellent as Galvin, in a role many consider his finest. I'm not certain if I can pick one finest performance from Newman, as Hud and Nobody's Fool, among others, are also tremendous performances from Newman.

But it's not just Newman who is in top form here. James Mason is still bringing it in his 70s as a man who seems like an elegant pillar of society on the surface, but is pretty darn ruthless beneath that exterior. Rampling is good although I think she's not quite given enough to do. All of the supporting roles do fine jobs with the material they're given, too. The location shooting does a very nice job of capturing the working-class side of Boston that's decidedly not the Back Bay Boston Brahmins.

All in all, The Verdict is an outstanding movie, and if you haven't seen it, make it a point to do so. It's that good.

For those who like Tennessee Williams

I was looking through the movies on my DVR trying to figure out what I should watch and do a review on. I eventually settled on The Fugitive Kind. Not having seen it before, I didn't realize until I watched it that it was based on a play by Tennessee Williams. But I watched it anyway to do a review here.

Marlon Brnado plays Valentine Xavier, nicknamed "Snakeskin" because of the snakeskin coat that he wears. He also plays a guitar, which is apparently a symbol to some people that he's up to no good. In fact, he's getting kicked out of New Orleans at the start of the movie, fleeing to wherever he ends up, which just happens to be a small town in Mississippi.

One of the first people he meets there is Vee Talbot (Maureen Stapleton), from whom he asks about the possibility of renting a room and getting a job. Vee informs him that there's a general store in town that might be able to use him. She also feels some attraction for him, since he's a young newcomer and she's probably frustrated by her husband the local sheriff (R.G. Armstrong) and being trapped in a small town.

Vee isn't the only woman interested in Snakeskin. There's also Carol Cutrere (Joanne Woodward), the local loose woman who drinks a lot and likes to go juking, which means doing the grand tour of all the local road houses, having a drink or two at each of them, and some dancing and making out. She's apparently got quite the reputation, since the owner of one of the juke joints insists to Snakeskin that he get Carol out of the place.

And then Snakskin goes to the Torrance store to inquire about that job. The store is nominally owned by Jabe Torrance (Victor Jory), but he's bedridden upstairs with some sort of injury that has him getting injections of what I'm guessing was heroin to which he's addicted, although I don't think the movie made this quite explicit. So the store downstairs is being run by his wife, Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani), who also falls for Snakeskin even though she too has secrets of her own. The sheriff learns from Vee that Snakeskin might be a risk to everybody in town and orders him to leave, but then some of those secrets come to life.

As I said at the beginning, I didn't realize until I saw the opening credits that The Fugitive Kind is based on a play by Tennessee Williams. As you might be able to guess from that opening paragraph, I'm not the biggest fan of Williams, or a lot of Southern gothic, finding the characters overheated and artificial, as well as generally unsympathetic. The Fugitive Kind has that in spades; when Marlon Brando is playing the most sympathetic of all the lead characters you know there's a problem here.

In some ways, that's a big shame, too, since the movie is actually generally well acted. It's just that the actors are all given such ridiculous material to work with, being asked to be loud and obnoxious. Some people are definitely going to love The Fugitive Kind, especially if they already like Southern gothic and wand to see a movie for the acting lessons one can glean. Others, like me, may find it a bit of a slog. So The Fugitive Kind is definitely the sort of movie you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Serpico

I had the opportunity to record Serpico during one of the free preview weekends. It's going to be on again multiple times this week, starting at 4:45 PM tomorrow on Showtime 2, so I sat down this weekend to watch it and do a post on it here.

Based on the true story of New York police detective Frank Serpico, the movie starts off in 1971 with his being shot in the face and taken to hospital. The police chief, Sidney Green (John Randolph) is informed, and he worries that Serpico was shot by another cop. After all, several police officers have already said they wouldn't mind seeing Serpico shot.

Flash back several years, to when Serpico graduated the police academy. He'd always dreamed of becoming a police officer, and his family are understandably proud of him. Serpico becomes a patrolman, partnered with an older cop, and it's here that he has his first taste of corruption, when a diner owner offers both of them free chicken soup. Frank doesn't want chicken soup, and is willing to pay for the roast beef sandwich he does want, but the older cop is horrified that Serpico won't just shut up and take the free meal.

Then on the police radio, he hears of a potential rape in progress. He's probably in the closest car, but the location is technically in a different sector, so his partner tries to let the cops in the other sector handle it, which doesn't seem good for public safety. When Serpico does arrest one of the suspects, the other cops pressure him not to take credit for the arrest.

It continues like this, while Frank tries to become a detective and starts dating a woman who studies ballet. Frank is also unconventional in other ways, growing his hair out and wanting to patrol in plain clothes and his own car, since he figures this is a better way to catch criminals. The downside to this is that during one arrest, some cops in uniform don't recognize him (and to be fair, why should they).

The monetary corruption continues, and Serpico contacts Bob Blair (Tony Roberts), a man in the Mayor's office investigating police internal affairs. Blair wants Frank to testify, although that carries the obvious risk that cops will know who threw a giant spotlight on the rampant corruption going on and whom to target. Frank starts thinking about going to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, it's increasingly becoming clear that the corruption isn't just beat cops taking bribes from local businesses and drug dealers, but that it goes all the way to the top, and has for decades. The idea that the brass would be ignorant of what's going on is ludicrous, of course. The police increasingly turn against their colleague Serpico, which is going to lead to his shooting when, during a drug bust, two of them refused to back him up and let the drug dealer shoot him.

Al Pacino gives a pretty good performance, while location shooting greatly enhances the feeling of realism. This is a New York City that's crumbling both physcially and societally, with the police and much of the political class being responsible for a good share of that destruction. Serpico is highly worth watching, and is available on Blu-ray if you don't have the Showtime package.

Serpico is a movie that's relevant 50 years on, largely because police corruption has never gone away, and never will as long as we have a state that has so much power that nobody can enforce all the laws and they have to be enforced arbitrarily. Of course, nobody wants learn that lesson, because you've got half the country that still believes in "law and order", while the other half really cares more about law enforcement being used for their ends against people in the first half than they actually do about corruption and state-sanctioned violence. (And to be fair, Serpico himself is shown to be rather violent when dealing with criminals like the rapists.) One doubts that the lessons that should be learned from Serpico are the ones that will be learned.

Dog Day Afternoon

Back in January when TCM ran a night of "true crime" movies, one that I recorded was Dog Day Afternoon. It's out on DVD, so I'm OK doing a full-length post on it.

The movie starts off with a series of images of New York that show what could be any late summer day in the city, circa 1972. Eventually, we get to three guys in a car outside a local bank branch just before closing time: Sonny (Al Pacino), Sal (John Cazale), and Stevie (Gary Springer). They look like they're casing the joint. Eventually, the three go in, and Sal sits down with bank manager Mulvaney (Sully Boyar, an actor I'd never heard of), and pulls out a gun. Oh, they're going to rob the place all right. Sonny also pulls out his gun and demands the tellers give them the money and open the vault.

But things quickly go wrong. First, Stevie gets cold feet and decides he's not going to shoot anybody, so he flees the scene! Then, Mulvaney points out that they already had a pickup of money earlier in the day, so that there's only a couple thousand dollars maximum in the bank. They're not going to get anywhere near what they hoped. And then the phone rings. It's police detective Moretti (Charles Durning), informing sonny that the police have the bank surrounded, and there's no way for the robbers to get out.

So, Sunny decides that he's going to hold the bank employees hostage to try to get some concessions out of the police, which ultimately means a hoped-for plane to somewhere out of the country. But as the negotiation is going on, things get ever more complicated as a crowd forms just on the other side of the police barricades (reminiscent of Fourteen Hours). And then we learn just why Sonny decided to rob the bank. Although he has a legal wife, he's also got a gay lover in Leon (Chris Sarandon). They had a "gay wedding", back in the days when there was no way two gays could legally marry each other. Well, maybe there was one way, which would be if one of them got a sex-change operation. Leon needs the money for that.

Dog Day Afternoon, as a true crime movie, is supposed to be straight up drama. And for the most part, there a lot of good dramatic plot elements. But the movie also has a very surprisingly level of dark comedy throughout. It starts early enough and innocently enough with Stevie fleeing because he doesn't want to shoot anybody, and slowly escalates with absurd moments like one of the tellers' husbands calling to find out if he's going to have to make dinner for himself. Meanwhile, the bank employees are beginning to develop a Stockholm syndrome-type bond with their captors, at times bickering among themselves and making demands of the captors. You can't lock us in the vault! How are we going to go to the bathroom?

Dog Day Afternoon is a wonderful movie thanks both to the intelligent script, and the excellent acting from much of the cast. Pacino, understandably, leads the way. Cazale does a great job playing dim-witted, and Durning makes a really good detective trying to manage the situation, at least until the FBI gets there and makes life more difficult for everybody. But the smaller characters come across as realistically drawn, too.

Dog Day Afternoon is a movie that I can highly recommend.

Deathtrap

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to watch Deathtrap off of my DVR. It turns out that you can get it on Blu-Ray from the TCM Shop, so I'm not opposed to doing a fuller-length post on it. Doing an actual full-length post, however, may be a bit of a problem, as you shall soon see.

Michael Caine plays Sidney Bruhl, a playwright living out on Long Island with his wife Myra (Dyan Cannon), who has a heart condition. As the film opens, Sidney is on Brodaway at the premiere of his new play, while Myra is at home taking her pills waiting for the reviews. Those reviews are unfortunately negative. Where Sidney used to be the big hit of Broadway writers, he's become a dud with his past several plays, this one apparently being the worst of them all.

Having a string of failures is obviously a problem, but there's another indignity coming. At the premiere of his play, he was sent by courier a copy of a play-in-progress called Deathtrap, by Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve), who had been a student of Sidney's at a seminar Sidney did the previous year. Clifford would like an honest review of it, if that wouldn't be too much trouble. Sidney brings Deathtrap home with him, reads it, and discovers... this is the perfect two-act play. It'll be a surefire hit on Broadway and make big money for its playwright.

So at this point Sidney has an outlandish idea. Nobody else but him, Clifford, and Myra know that Clifford is writing this play; Clifford doesn't have any family and not much in the way of friends around since he's cloistered himself away writing Deathtrap, and so on. So it would be just too perfect if Sidney invited Clifford over for the review, then killed Clifford and took credit for the play himself. Since this is a movie and the plan is such utter nonsense, you know that Sidney is going to put it into action.

Now, all of this happenns in the first few reels, and by the time Sidney reveals the truth of what he's going to do to Clifford, the movie is maybe a half-hour into its two-hour running time. And that's why it's tough to do a real full-length post on the movie. You know that there's a lot more that's going to happen, but for a reviewer to suggest what any of that something is would be to give away a lot of the plot. And Deathtrap the movie is not one of those where you want to know too much about what happens going into it.

That having been said, the movie is pretty good. Michael Caine goes a bit over the top, I think, but then this is based on a stage play and you get the impression that Caine is almost playing to the back rows here. It's material that probably works better on a stage than on the screen. Christopher Reeve is excellent; he's not just Superman when it comes to being an actor. Dyan Cannon isn't bad, although she here is the latest in a long line of Hollywood actresses who look a bit miscast as seriously ill women. The one cast member I found irritating is Irene Worth, who plays a psychic, who shows up in a couple of scenes to be just too convenient. I also had a problem with the ultimate ending wrapping up all the loose ends, which seemed even less plausible than the rest of the movie.

Any quibbles aside, Deathtrap is well worth watching.

Garbo says a word or two

One of the movies stuck on my DVR that I finally got around to watching is Garbo Talks. It's available on DVD, so I can feel comfortable doing a full-length blog post on it.

Ron Silver plays Gilbert Rolfe, an accountant with one of the big firms in New York City liing with his wife Lisa (Carrie Fisher). Gilbert also has a mother Estelle (Anne Bancroft) who is quite the character. She loves the movies of Greta Garbo, and she has principles to the point that she's willing to get arrested for them. Indeed, at the start of the movie, Estelle has just gotten arrested again, in a dispute over the price of some produce. It's up to Gilbert to bail her out of jail. What a mother!

Things, however, are about to change. Estelle has been suffering from headaches recently, and they've been getting more severe. When she goes to the doctor, she gets the terrible news: she's got a brain tumor, and it's inoperable. There are some treatments, but they're probably going to be futile, so in all likelihood she's only got six months or so to live. She can't live in her apartment any longer, so it's off to the hospital while the doctors treat her as best they can, and while Estelle waits to die. While having a conversation with Gilbert at the hospital, she comes up with a daffy wish: she'd like the opportunity to meet Greta Garbo before she dies.

It was well enough known that it didn't take the sort of people who nowadays read movie blogs to be aware that there's a big problem with this wish. Garbo was famously private. Not quite reclusive, since she could be seen in shops in the vicinity of her Manhattan apartment; but private in that she wasn't about to let anybody get close to her and didn't do any public appearances. How's a regular schlub like Gilbert Rolfe going to find Greta Garbo, much less convince her to see his mother?

With this begins our son's quirky quest to fulfill his mother's dying wish, regardless of the consequences. There's a substantial monetary commitment in trying to find her, which puts a strain both on his work and on his marriage. But along the way, Gilbert meets a number of interesting characters played by a series of actors not quite of the prestige of an Anne Bancroft. Howard Da Silva (in his final film) plays a photographer who used to stalk people to get photos of them; Hermione Gingold (also in her final film) plays a woman who made silent films with Garbo, although she was well down the cast list; Harvey Fierstien plays a gay man Gilbert meets on Fire Island; and Dorothy Loudon has a hilarious scene as a cat lady/agent.

All in all, Garbo Talks is a pretty good journey, although I have to admit that I found the Estelle character to be terribly irritating. It's easy to understand why Lisa would find her difficult and why Gilbert's sudden chasing of Greta Garbo would put a huge strain on her marriage. Not that Lisa is a saint, of course. But the problems Lisa poses Gilbert seem more for comic effect, while Estelle is the sort of person you'd think seriously about not bailing out the next time she got herself arrested. It is, however, a testament to Anne Bancroft's acting that she makes Estelle a compelling character to watch.

Especially if it shows up on TV anywhere, give Garbo Talks a chance.