Carry On At Your Convenience (1971)

 

CARRY ON AT YOUR CONVENIENCE  (1971)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey,

    Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw, Hattie Jacques,

    Kenneth Cope, Patsy Rowlands, Jacki Piper,

    Richard O'Callaghan, Bill Maynard, Davy Kaye

The workers at a toilet factory go on strike, and the Carry On Gang runs amok. There's much silliness, and the double entendres are about what you'd expect, but this one's loose, even by the standards of a "Carry On" film, and the underlying sentiment is conspicuously anti-union. The highlight is probably an extended sequence toward the end, with labour and management together on an excursion bus, getting drunk and running around an amusement park. Then they all go back to work. Alternate titles (listed in the opening credits): "Down the Spout", "Ladies Please Be Seated", "Up the Workers" and "Labour Relations Are the People Who Come To See You When You're Having a Baby". That's "Carry On".

The Blue and the Gray (1982)

 

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY  (1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Andrew V. McLaglen

    Stacy Keach, John Hammond, Gregory Peck

    Sterling Hayden, Diane Baker, Colleen Dewhurst,

    Rip Torn, Rory Calhoun, Geraldine Page,

    Lloyd Bridges, Kathleen Beller, Warren Oates,

    Paul Winfield, John Vernon, Robert Vaughn

Watching this six-hour miniseries is like reading one of those big 19th-century novels in which characters connect and then reconnect over a vast expanse of time and geography. It follows the Civil War adventures of a Virginia farm boy whose talent for drawing lands him a job with a Gettysburg newspaper on the eve of the conflict. Encouraged by Abraham Lincoln to cover the war as an artist/correspondent, he turns up at every key battle and event from Bull Run to Appomattox, recording it all with his pencil and sketchbook. John Hammond, who plays the artist, could be Eddie Redmayne's twin brother. Stacy Keach is both jaunty and commanding as a dashing Union spy. Sterling Hayden, in his last screen appearance, plays John Brown. Rory Calhoun plays Meade. Rip Torn plays Grant. Gregory Peck, whose stoic demeanor was sometimes called Lincolnesque, plays Lincoln. Director Andrew McLaglen got his start as an assistant to John Ford, and went on to make a lot of mostly ordinary movies. Here, he shows what he could do on a large canvas with a decent script. The scale is epic, but the storytelling is intimate, and the second-unit work is first rate. 

The Chaperone (2018)

THE CHAPERONE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Engler

    Elizabeth McGovern, Haley Lu Richardson, 

    Géza Rohrig, Victoria Hill, Campbell Scott, 

    Blythe Danner, Miranda Otto, Andrew Burnap

In 1922, Mrs. Myra Brooks of Wichita, Kansas, dispatches her precocious, 15-year-old daughter Louise to New York City to pursue a career in modern dance. To keep an eye on the girl while she's there, Myra sends along a middle-aged mother of two named Nora (Elizabeth McGovern), and the movie's about what happens to the two of them once they get off the train. New York turns out to be nothing like Wichita, and that's just fine with Louise, but Nora has a history in the city and a personal quest of her own. Her story as she unlocks the key to her past and (literally and figuratively) loosens her corset is crucial, and McGovern captures Nora's gradual awakening with understated sympathy and grace. Haley Lu Richardson, who plays Louise, gets the look right sometimes, but the real Louise Brooks had an "it" factor on screen that no actress playing her could hope to duplicate. That's not Richardson's fault, and as an impetuous teenager out to take life and the city by storm, she's not bad. She's just not Louise Brooks.