WHERE LOVE HAS GONE: where-ever it's gone why didn't you take me with you?

The more I see of Susan Hayward the less I like her.
It's getting to the stage now where - when presented with the opportunity to view one of her films - I have to very seriously consider whether I can tolerate sitting through another 90 minutes to 2 hours of her particular brand of acting.
Whoever she's playing, she never fails to fail to convince me that she is that character, rather than just
an actress named Susan Hayward acting out a part particularly unpersuasively.

The real-life Dorian Grey of Hollywood film stars, she always looks the same, her immobile hair never changes, and her character never ages even when, as is the case with WHERE LOVE HAS GONE, the story covers a period of almost 20 years.
Yet despite all this, Susan Hayward is not the worst thing about this film.
That dubious honour belongs to the film itself along with everyone in it and everyone involved in making it.
This bloated, empty vessel, this rancid cinematic cargo of rotting dung spawned from the lurid imagination of Harold Robbins, is so terrible it gives the airport novel genre a bad name.
Hayward plays Valerie Hayden, the world's most unlikely world renowned sculptress. In the studio she's a whizz with a hammer and chisel, and out of it she's a world class nymphomaniac. The former talent is god given, the latter - as the film goes to extraordinarily repetitive lengths to make clear - is the result of a loveless childhood. Her domineering mother, played by Bette Davis, is more concerned with maintaining the Hayden family's good name in San Francisco society, than showing her daughter affection.
The only thing mother and daughter can agree on is Major Luke Miller (Mike Connors). A bona fide World War 2 hero and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Mrs Hayden sees him as perfect husband material, while Valerie's smitten when she witnesses him standing up to her mother. And so he allows himself to be drawn into their spider's web where he soon discovers that fighting the Japs was a walk in the park compared to life with the Haydens.
All of this overheated and unoriginal melodrama plays out in a flashback prompted by their teenage daughter's (Joey Heatherton)  murder of her mother's lover, more than a decade after Valerie divorced her broken and defeated husband.

Supposedly inspired by the real life 1958 killing of film star Lana Turner's gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato by her teenage daughter some six years earlier WHERE LOVE HAS GONE lacks even that tawdry event's slender sliver of class. The story's little more than a warmed over assortment of tired and tiresome melodramatic cliches, the script is hysterical ("I love all the wrong people and hate all the right ones!" and "I use sex the way you use alcohol" are just 2 examples) and the cast extremely lacklustre. Davis inserts pauses into her lines in all the wrong places, Connors oozes less charisma than a garden fence, and Heatherton's idea of a 15 year old sexpot is a perpetual pout.
What's perhaps most disappointing is that this film's not even trashy enough to rise to the status of a camp classic. It's only redeeming feature is that it's not three hours long and, really, that's no reason  to invest valuable minutes of your life in watching it. I've done the dirty work so you don't have to.

THE LAS VEGAS STORY: should be reported under the Trade Descriptions Act

This 1952 RKO drama should more accurately be titled 'A Story Set in Las Vegas' since it is not a
National Geographic-style documentary but rather a love triangle that happens to play out in Nevada's gambling capital.
Ok, so 'A Story Set in Las Vegas' isn't half as sexy a proposition but it would still boast Jane Russell as one of the names above the title. I can't say I've ever cared much for Miss Russell. Her obvious attractions aside I've always found her rather bland and untalented, but she looks almost spectacularly seductive here. Which is a good thing because she still can't act her way out of a paper bag.
A gratuitous number of very unsubtle extreme close-ups not only offer copious opportunities to drink in her charms, but also plenty of time to study her inability to convincingly register emotion. Whether she's wistful, thoughtful, puzzled, happy or angry her flawless features remain mostly blank.
Thankfully, co-star Victor Mature (whom I've also never cared for much) made a pact with her not to show-up her limited acting abilities because he also fails to convey very much emotion through the course of his many close-ups.
It's like watching two beautifully carved and polished pieces of wood revisiting the scene of a lost love.
The heavy lifting is left to Vincent Price as the sneering, ever so slightly less than masculine, baddie, and the wonderfully laid back Hoagy Carmichael as the piano-playing platonic friend Russell left behind when she ran out on Mature several years earlier. Price thankfully tones down the ham which afflicted many of his performances in the late 40s and early 50s but still fails to provide us with one convincing reason why Russell would have married him, while Carmichael's peerless renderings of 'The Monkey Song', 'My Resistance is Low' and 'I Get Along Without You Very Well' give the film a much needed touch of class.
The story's nothing special but the film has value as a record of a kinder, gentler Las Vegas before it morphed into a collection of mega-resorts each trying to top its neighbour for tacky glamour and

life-size recreations of other parts of the world. There's something almost quaint about the cars parked along Fremont Street outside the small, modestly adorned (by Vegas standards) casinos, and the fact that one could walk into the lobby of a casino and stand there completely unjostled by throngs of senior citizens and drunken stag and hen parties rushing to unload their life savings into slot machines.
Equally quaint is the notion that Las Vegas Police Lieutenant Mature could singlehandedly patrol Fremont Street and The Strip, maintaining law and order in every casino while also finding time to bust underage lovebirds attempting to tie the knot in one of the city's many chapels of love, and to reignite his romance with Russell.
Mostly mundane and rarely memorable, if this film truly were the story of Las Vegas its star would be Circus Circus not Caesar's Palace.

THE MEANEST MAN IN THE WORLD: file this one under 'What Was He Thinking?'

Jack Benny's penultimate film offers slim pickings for fans of his peerless radio show.
Not only does 1943's THE MEANEST MAN IN THE WORLD clock in at a meagre 57 minutes but it lacks depth or any moments of real humour. Any one of his radio shows packs more laughs and characterisation into its 30 minute running time than does this movie.
He plays Richard Clarke, a kind hearted and (therefore) unsuccessful small town lawyer who moves to Manhattan in hopes of making his fortune and discovers that behaving like a ruthless heel is the fast track route to  success. His mean reputation brings him a waiting room full of callous clients but it also threatens his romance with hometown sweetheart Janie Brown, played by Priscilla Lane.
Now I'm a huge Jack Benny fan, and I came to this film wanting to like it. His radio shows contain some of the sharpest comedy ever written, and the character he created of Jack Benny the mean, egotistical, childish comedian and deluded violinist is without equal. Far more than simply a collection of catch phrases and jokes, the radio Jack Benny is a three dimensional, living, breathing person.
Which makes THE MEANEST MAN IN THE WORLD even more puzzling.
Why did Benny allow himself to be cast in a part that didn't suit his persona, in a film with a script that is so shallow, juvenile and bereft of good lines that it couldn't fail to disappoint his legions of fans?
Where did the magic disappear to?
It's not simply a case of a radio performer failing to make the transition to the big screen. The
previous year Benny had scored an enormous critical and popular hit with 'To Be Or Not To Be' under the direction of the legendary Ernst Lubitsch. There's no question that he had the acting chops to complement his masterful sense of comedic timing, but what's missing from MEANEST MAN is a quality script. 
The film was made by Twentieth Century Fox at a time when the studio was also hard at work destroying the reputation of Laurel and Hardy with a series of increasingly dire comedy features, and  a similar sense of tired, threadbare desperation pervades MEANEST MAN. There's nothing engaging about the story or the performances and the only incentive to keep watching is the increasingly forlorn hope that some of the familiar magic must burst forth at some point.
With Laurel and Hardy's 40s output that never happened and their stint at Fox proved to be their big screen swansong. Benny was much luckier. He escaped with his career and reputation intact and ended his days as an elder statesman of American comedy.

TROPIC THUNDER: I hate the smell of self indulgence in the morning - or, indeed, at any time of day

I must be a sucker for punishment.

I went to see TROPIC THUNDER on its cinematic release in the summer of 2008. It was a birthday treat and I hated it - the film not the treat that is, although it did turn the treat into something of an ordeal.

I couldn’t believe that something so heavily hyped as the comedy event of the season and so laden with comedic talent could be so bereft of laughs.

It left me with a nagging feeling that maybe I missed something so I’ve just watched the film again on DVD.

I hadn’t missed a thing.

This second viewing was no more enjoyable than the first. All it did was confirm my initial impression although, on the plus side, I now have a much clearer understanding of why it doesn’t work.

The film is based on the mistaken premise that us ordinary folk find the inner workings of Hollywood as fascinating and relatable as those who actually work in the film business.

TROPIC THUNDER is a movie about the making of a film called TROPIC THUNDER – a big budget Vietnam War action epic with eerie similarities to “Apocalypse Now” - being shot on location in south-east Asia and beset by problems.

The clashing egos of the three stars have put the production a month behind schedule after just five days of shooting and studio head Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) is threatening to murder the first-time director (Steve Coogan) if he doesn’t regain control.

A bizarre series of events finds the cast abandoned alone in the jungle, believing they’re shooting the film guerrilla-style and unable to differentiate make-believe from reality when they’re targeted by a ruthless, real-life gang of heroin traffickers.

TROPIC THUNDER is the multi-million dollar equivalent of you or I making a movie about our workplace and filling it with the characters, egos and sometimes bizarre behaviours which make us laugh or cringe and provide us with the material for jokes and stories to share with our co-workers.

But you’ve got to be there to find it funny.

Chances are that if you’re not then my stories about the weird personal habits of one of my office colleagues are likely to leave you cold.

Granted that a satire on the machinations of Tinseltown will have broader appeal than one set in my office but really, how many of us know enough agents or studio moguls to find the inside jokes funny?

Spoofing the actors is a more promising proposition and in Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Jeff

Portnoy (Jack Black) and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey jr) we get three fictitious film stars very clearly modelled on real-life headline grabbing stars.

Speedman is a Stallone-like action hero whose Rambo-style “Scorcher” franchise has run to six, increasingly repetitive instalments. Portnoy is a combination of the worst of Eddie Murphy and Chris Farley, while five-time Oscar winner Lazarus – “the greatest actor of his generation” – could easily be mistaken for Russell Crowe.

With everything we know about Murphy, Stallone and Crowe from their films and the gossip columns there should be plenty of material for some very pointed and funny satire.  

Unfortunately writer-producer-director and star Ben Stiller has opted to rely on the cast’s ability to improvise rather than use this source material to provide them with a strong script. And as is painfully clear from one of the accompanying DVD featurettes encouraging the cast to make it up as they go along just ain’t funny.

The bulk of the laughs come in the film’s first seven minutes. The subsequent one hour and forty minutes generate a meagre six or seven chuckles and an awful lot of silence, broken only by the sound of audible cringing at Tom Cruise’s excruciatingly unamusing and disturbing cameo.

The sum of the parts of TROPIC THUNDER add up to considerably less than its whole and I predict that a year from now few will even remember this self-indulgent bore.