A two-part made for TV effort, this special depicts the dysfunctional Jackson family, which has somehow managed to raise its children in such a way that they have managed to rise above their steel town backgrounds to the tops of the charts in the music field. Though obviously not delving into the more controversial and sensational aspects of their ...
Fame is set at New York's High School of Performing Arts, where talented teens train for show-business careers. The film concentrates on five of the most gifted students: singer Irene Cara, actors Paul McCrane and Barry Miller, dancer Gene Anthony Ray, and musician Lee Currieri. More so than the subsequent TV series Fame, the film emphasizes the ...
Lawrence Kasdan originally wrote his script for The Bodyguard in the late 1960s as a vehicle for Steve McQueen; by the time it reached the screen, Kasdan's star was another movie hearthrob, Kevin Costner. When imperious musical superstar Whitney Houston begins receiving death threats, she is compelled to hire a bodyguard. Enter Costner, who ...
The third remake of the 1932 drama What Price Hollywood?, this adaptation of A Star Is Born moved the story into the mid-1970's and changed the milieu from the movie business to pop music. John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) is a rock star whose career has peaked; he is numbed by booze and cocaine, his music has lost its edge, and his ...
This sequel to the rock & roll mystery Eddie and the Cruisers explains many of the questions concerning the mysterious death of 1960s rocker Eddie Wilson, who with his Cruisers was celebrating the success of their first album when he got in a terrible car wreck, from which his body was never recovered. Also missing were the masters from the group ...
What's Love Got to Do With It? is the filmed biography of R&B/pop singer Tina Turner (Angela Bassett), documenting her efforts to break away from her abusive husband Ike (Laurence Fishburne). After a few scenes detailing Tina's life as a young singer in Nutbush, TN, she's discovered by Ike Turner, an already established songwriter, guitarist, and ...
Pop singer Neil Diamond stars in this ill-begotten second remake of Al Jolson's seminal 1927 musical The Jazz Singer. The moth-eaten story concerns a cantor's son who desires success as a pop singer, despite the wishes of his imperious father. The film takes place in the present day with Yussel Rabinowitz (Neil Diamond) playing a young (though ...
The film traces Naples-born Caruso's ascension from adolescent choir singer to the uppermost ranks of the opera world. Caruso is brought to America, getting off to a bad start by inadvertently insulting the impresario (Carl Benton Reid) responsible for his Metropolitan debut. This complication has a happy outcome when Caruso marries his benefactor ...
Susan Hayward pulls out all the stops, and then some, in this cinemadaptation of singer Lillian Roth's autobiography I'll Cry Tomorrow. In as harshly realistic a manner as possible in the still censor-dominated Hollywood of 1955, the film recounts Roth's rise to fame, her precipitous fall and her tearful comeback. The fact that Roth loves not ...
Chuck Barris is best known to most Americans as the guy who used to host The Gong Show. He was also the creator and producer of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and a handful of other successful game shows in the 1960s and 1970s. But was he also a hired killer working with the CIA? That's the take-it-or-leave-it premise of Confessions of a ...
Director Sylvester Stallone proves you really can't go home again in Staying Alive, the absurd sequel to Saturday Night Fever. The story finds Tony Manero (Travolta) six years later working as a waiter in a nightclub while he tries to realize his dreams of dancing on Broadway (what tough street kid from Brooklyn doesn't?) He eventually makes the ...
John Fowles' original novel The French Lieutenant's Woman was distinguished by a literary technique that involved telling a story of Victorian sexual and social oppression within the bounds of a 1970s viewpoint. How does one convey this time-frame dichotomy on film? The decision made by director Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter was to frame Fowles' ...
The Five Pennies is the life story of influential jazz cornetist Red Nichols, played here by a remarkably straight-faced Danny Kaye. The somewhat romanticized screenplay chronicles Nichols' rise from obscurity, annotates the many future bandleaders who would play with Nichols' "Five Pennies," and details his self-destructive streak and (seeming) ...
Choreographer and filmmaker Herbert Ross directs the romantic backstage drama The Dancers, which features a production of Giselle by the American Ballet Theatre. Mikhail Baryshnikov stars as macho lead dancer Tony Sergoyev, the director of a ballet company beginning a production of Giselle in southern Italy. Tony has been involved with several of ...
A haunting work of stark confessionalism disguised as a taut noir thriller, In a Lonely Place -- Nicholas Ray's bleak, desperate tale of fear and self-loathing in Hollywood -- remains one of the filmmaker's greatest and most deeply resonant features. It stars Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele, a fading screenwriter suffering from creative burnout; ...
MGM's third follow-up to its landmark Broadway Melody is short on story, but that's okay, since the plot is merely a clothesline upon which to hang sleek and opulent musical production numbers by Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell -- particularly a breathless and eye-popping gloriously black-and-white six-minute tap dance finale between Astaire and ...
Not even considered a good film back in 1935, Dangerous is held together by the mesmerizing performance of Bette Davis. The star is cast as alcoholic, self-destructive stage actress Joyce Heath, a character obviously based on Jeanne Eagels. Wealthy architect Don Bellows (Franchot Tone) becomes convinced that Joyce can be rehabilitated with the ...
As played by Jessica Lange, Frances Farmer is a rebel from the word go, winning a high school essay award by writing a piece in defense of Communism. Determining to become an actress, Frances is equally determined not to play the Hollywood game: she refuses to acquiesce to idiotic publicity stunts, and insists upon appearing on screen sans ...
Deep in My Heart is the MGM-ified biography of composer Sigmund Romberg, here played by José Ferrer. Evidently the scripters didn't feel that the life of Romberg (as set down by author Elliott Arnold, whose book was used as the film's basis) had enough drama to fill out two hours and ten minutes. As a result, the film is overstocked with guest ...
The story of Philadelphia-based rock 'n' roll starmaker Bob Marcucci is given a pointed a clef treatment in The Idolmaker. Ray Sharkey plays Vincent Vacarri, who takes a couple of raw young kids (Peter Gallagher and Paul Land) and molds them into teen idols. If Gallagher and Land seem at times to be clones of Fabian and Frankie Avalon, then you ...
Kirk Douglas plays the corrupt and amoral head of a major film studio in this Hollywood drama, often regarded as one of the film's industry's most interesting glimpses at itself. Actress Gloria Lorrison (Lana Turner), director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), and screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) are invited to a meeting at a Hollywood ...
The 1954 musical remake of A Star is Born could have been titled A Star is Reborn , in that it represented the triumphal return to the screen of Judy Garland after a four-year absence. The remake adheres closely to the plotline of the 1937 original: An alcoholic film star, on his last professional legs, gives a career boost to a unknown aspiring ...
Originally made for cable television, this imaginative biopic chronicles the life of Marilyn Monroe (Mira Sorvino), including the years before she changed her name from Norma Jean Baker (Ashley Judd) and was transformed into the screen persona that made her a legendary sex symbol. The movie employs unconventional, dream-like storytelling ...
Diana Ross plays the magnificent, tragic song stylist Billie Holiday, who while writhing in a strait jacket in a prison cell, awaiting sentencing on drug charges, reflects on her turbulent life. Raped in her youth by a drunk (Adolph Caesar), then compelled to work as a domestic in a Harlem whorehouse, Holliday is encouraged to try for a singing ...
A French music lover befriends a once-great American jazz artist and attempts to save him from self-destruction in this moody drama. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon portrays Dale Turner, a fictional musician inspired by a number of famed jazz figures, including Bud Powell and Lester Young. Largely forgotten in his home country, Turner has moved to Paris ...
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