Men Movies History

A chain-smoking, alcoholic New York actress (Marsha Mason), just out of rehab, struggles to maintain her sobriety while balancing various relationships: with her daughter (Kristy McNichol), her best friends (Joan Hackett, James Coco), and an ex-lover (David Dukes) who wants her to play the lead role in his new play based on their relationship. This being a Neil Simon screenplay, everybody is ready with a quick, witty retort; such scripts require actors who can dig beneath the dialogue to find genuine characters, and its a testament to the immensely talented cast that they are able to make this maudlin story work so incredibly well: Mason received her fourth and final Oscar nomination for her terrific performance here, and both Hackett and Coco were also nominated in support -- Hackett, especially, is magnificent as a glamorous socialite, obsessed with her beauty and youth, but hiding genuine warmth and love beneath the brittle facade. Coco is fine, though his performance established a notable achievement in cinema history: he was the first actor to be nominated for both the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor and the Razzie as Worst Supporting Actor for the same role (he lost both).

Love story of Communist sympathizing journalists John "Jack" Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), who initially bond over their opposition to the US entering World War I, then travel to Russia to cover the Revolutions of 1917. Gargantuan epic was Beatty's dream project for over a decade and the film reflects both his artistic smarts and his obvious vanity: on the one hand, the device of having "witnesses" (including: Roger Nash Baldwin, founder of the ACLU; novelist Henry Miller; journalist Adela Rogers St. John, etc.) recall their memory of the events depicted reinforces their impact; on the other hand, Beatty's "befuddled" persona is at its most extreme here. I do have to give props to the script (credited to Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, with uncredited assistance from Peter Feibleman, Robert Towne and Elaine May): it's not a mash note to Communism -- while acknowledging real-world issues, by the end of the film, there is recognition that the ideology has led to dictatorship and massive oppression. It's the rare epic film that gets better as it goes along, aided by a strong cast that includes Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill (who had an affair with Bryant) and Maureen Stapleton as anarchist Emma Goldman; Gene Hackman has an unbilled cameo, which he did as a thank you to Beatty for kick-starting his career with Bonnie & Clyde (1967). Surprisingly a box office hit (on a budget of $32M, the movie made $40M -- adjusted for inflation, that's $130M in 2019 dollars), the film was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, with Beatty becoming the third person (after Orson Welles and Woody Allen) nominated for Director, Actor and Original Screenplay -- he won the Best Director prize, and the film also won Oscars for Best Supporting Actress (Stapleton) and Best Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro).