Marquee History
Week 6 - 2016
By Max Braden
February 5, 2016
25 years ago - February 8, 1991
Sleeping with the Enemy
Just a year before, Julia Roberts had rocketed to stardom with her vibrant laughter in Pretty Woman. Here she appeared in a darker thriller, based on the 1987 novel by Nancy Price. Roberts stars as the wife of an emotionally and physically abusive husband (played by Patrick Bergin) who fakes her own death and assumes a new identity to escape him. Kevin Anderson plays a supporting role as a love interest in her new town. Reviews were poor, but no doubt Julia Roberts drew in audiences anyway; this was the film that finally knocked Home Alone out of the top box office spot in its 13th week. Sleeping With the Enemy opened at #1 with $13.8 million from 1,406 theaters and went on to earn $101 million, the 8th highest grossing movie of the year.
L.A. Story
There are plenty of candidates to choose from when picking a favorite Steve Martin movie, and this may not be the most common choice, but for me L.A. Story is by far my favorite and easily in my top 10 favorite movies ever. After an early movie career of shtick comedies such as The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains, Martin’s style had matured in the late 1980s with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Parenthood.
Now 45-years-old, he starred in this romantic comedy as a character who matures past frivolous entertainments to accept a deeper relationship. He plays Harris Telemacher, a superfluous weatherman in Los Angeles who is bored with both his own life and the superficial people and culture surrounding him. He’s enthralled when he meets a journalist from London named Sara (his real-life wife Victoria Tennant), but they are both technically unavailable and he struggles with how to impress her. Marilu Henner and Richard E. Grant play supporting roles, with Sarah Jessica Parker playing a bubbly retail girl named SanDeE* and Patrick Stewart appearing as a hilariously militant maître d’.
Martin’s script takes shots at the celebrity culture of L.A. and also its intellectual posturing. One of the best jokes in the movie takes place in an art museum where Harris goes on at length describing in vivid detail the people and scene in a painting, concluding, “When I see painting like this, I get emotionally... erect,” only to have the camera reveal an abstract mash of colors on the canvas. The film is funny and sweet, perfectly capturing the time and also the sharpness of Steve Martin’s satirical outlook. Critics mostly agreed with me, and while audiences may have been pleased, the movie wasn’t as financially successful as his career highlights. L.A. Story opened at #2 with $6.6 million from 1,091 theaters and went on to earn $28.8 million.
The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter
As cheesy and ridiculous as it was, you’ll find some diehard fans of 1984’s fantasy adventure The NeverEnding Story (I know some of them personally) – but maybe not so diehard for its sequel. The cast has changed, but the characters return and the plot is similar: Bastian (Jonathan Brandis) goes back to Fantasia and must save it from destruction by the evil Xayide. Rock Biter, Falkor, and Atreyu all return. While the first film had earned good reviews (currently 81% Fresh at RottenTomatoes.com), this sequel was panned and holds a big fat zero at RottenTomatoes. The Neverending Story II did manage to come in at #4 for the weekend with $4.9 million from 1,188 theaters, but its final tally of $17.3 million was short of the $20 million for the first movie’s run in 1984. Still, there was a third entry in the series, released in a few markets in the U.S. in 1996.
30 years ago - February 7, 1986
F/X
Bryan Brown stars in this action thriller as a professional movie special effects artist who is hired by the government to fake an informant’s death, and of course things go wrong, leading him to employ his skills to survive. Brian Dennehy co-stars as police detective who becomes an ally. Jerry Orbach plays the witness and Angela Bassett makes her first film appearance as a TV reporter. Brown was known for being nominated for an Emmy for the miniseries The Thorn Birds three years earlier. Reviews for this movie were pretty good, but it couldn’t compete with holdovers Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The Color Purple, Murphy’s Romance, and Out of Africa. F/X opened at #5 with $3.2 million from 914 theaters (half the per-site average of Down and Out). Eventually it went on to earn $20.3 million and generated a sequel that brought back both Brown and Dennehy five years later, and a 1996 television series that lasted two seasons.
Hannah and Her Sisters
This comedy from Woody Allen about family and romantic entanglements was one of his most successful and most critically acclaimed films in his career. Mia Farrow, Allen’s romantic partner and frequent lead actress in his films since 1982, stars as Hannah, with Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as her sisters Lee and Holly. Michael Caine plays Hannah’s current husband who is obsessed with Lee, while Allen plays her hypochondriac former husband who pursues a relationship with Holly. Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow’s real-life mother) and Lloyd Nolan have their own story as the parents of the sisters. The field of actors providing supporting roles includes Max von Sydow, Carrie Fisher, Sam Waterston, Daniel Stern, Julie Kavner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, J. T. Walsh, John Turturro, and Tony Roberts.
The story takes place over two years, bookended by two Thanksgivings, and is told in segments. The tone is dialogue heavy, with Allen’s character providing the comic relief to the more serious drama in the other storylines and enough of a thematic presence that maybe the movie should have been titled Hannah and Mickey. Critics praised the acting, the writing, and the visual style of the film, all of which were rewarded at the Oscars a year after its release: a win for Allen’s screenplay, a rare win for both Supporting acting categories in the same movie (Caine and Wiest), and nominations for Best Picture, Director, Art Direction, and Film Editing. The film was also a hit at the box office. Hannah and Her sisters opened at 54 theaters this weekend with a $23,441 per-site average, enough to put it at #10 at the box office. After expanding to over 700 theaters in March, it went on to gross $40.0 million, making it the highest grossing movie of Allen’s career until 2011’s Midnight in Paris.
Come back next week for another installment of Marquee History!
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