The Staircase (2022 Antonio Campos)

Q pointed out in episode 4 that the staircase is a really weird one for a house of that size - she described it as being 'in a cupboard' - but it feels much like back stairs rather than a main staircase. Maybe it is the back stairs. I'll have to check on the next episode. I did. It is the back stairs. Why did she go up the back stairs?  Ask Marple.

Anyway, it's based on the true case of a woman who was found dead at the bottom of the stairs with evidence that she hadn't just fallen down them (she's Toni Collette, the husband is a variably accented Colin Firth). 

Various lawyers, children and step-children take differing views of what's going on, complicated by a French documentary maker recording the events. There's bats in the attic, too, but at this point in time I'm not sure whether that's got anything to do with anything.

I found the episode which puts forward the theory that she was attacked by an owl rather funny. You have to feel for Toni, who has to keep re-enacting her death in various different ways.

Many episodes have an extended single take scene. I'm glad to see these coming back into fashion. Though there's definitely not enough material here to fill its run time. One episode, seven I think it was, seemed to have no significant content whatsoever. So thrilled were we by the season finale that we stopped 10 minutes before the end to watch Gogglebox.

Michael Stuhlbarg is the defence attorney. With Dane DeHaan, Tim Guinee, Sophie Turner, Odessa Young, a disconcertingly blonde Juliette Binoche, Rosemarie DeWitt, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Parker Posey.

Created by Antonio Campos, who also directed six of the eight episodes, and has mixed credits (was one of the producers of Mary Marcy May Marlene).

Annapurna for HBO Max / Sky Atlantic.

The Outsiders (1983 Francis Ford Coppola)

Kathleen Rowell's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel evokes fifties colour cinematography and GWTW (both specifically and visually). Turf war between lower class Greasers and upper class Socs leads to murder, redemption through fire, death.

C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Diane Lane, Tom Cruise, Glenn Withrow, Leif Garrett, Tom Waits, S.E. Hinton (nurse).

With loads of Elvis on the soundtrack (including his very stripped-back version of 'Blue Moon'), well photographed by Stephen Burum and edited in a style approaching Jim Clark's by Anne Goursaud (One From the Heart, The Two Jakes, Bram Stoker's Dracula).

And, as a complete tangent, Diane Lane's mum:

Colleen Farrington, Playboy 1957

Angel Face (1953 Otto Preminger)

Apart from the fact that Jean Simmons only knows one piece on the piano (as far as I can tell, an original and beautiful composition by Dmitri Tiomkin called 'Nostalgia') we know she's a bit crazy as when medic Robert Mitchum slaps her to counter her hysteria, she slaps him back. (The story goes that when Preminger asked Mitchum to slap her, he slapped the director, with "Like that?" Preminger wanted him fired but Howard Hughes refused. Hughes always had a soft spot for Mitchum, as recorded elsewhere in these pages.)

We're reasonably sure she is trying to knock off her step-mother. When her project backfires, I'm not sure the writers Frank Nugent and Oscar Millard handle it as well as they might, though the downbeat ending is a doozy. Apart from these knockout car episodes the film is quite static.

Meanwhile Mitchum has blown relationship with Mona Freeman. Also in cast: Herbert Marshall, Barbara O'Neill, Leon Ames, Kenneth Tobey.

Shot by Harry Stradling Sr. RKO. Our print says 1952 but Tiomkin's cue sheet is dated March 13 1953.

Blind Date (1959 Joseph Losey)

We unfortunately saw a cropped version of Losey's rare 1959 thriller on TPTV, thus only half of Hardy Kruger's head is sometimes visible. It's rather good. Kruger arrives at a lady's apartment, followed soon after by the police - Gordon Jackson, then Stanley Baker and John Van Eyssen (both also in Losey's next film The Criminal). It appears the woman he is there to meet is murdered and they think the Dutchman did it. But as we've seen him arrive, we know he didn't... or do we? There's enough in Ben Barzman and Millard Lampell's BAFTA-nominated screenplay to keep you guessing, whilst it backtracks to show a slightly weird relationship progressing between artist Kruger and bored housewife Micheline Presle.

There's a slight foreshadowing in this of The Servant, in the social difference between down to earth Welshman Baker and more upper class Van Eyssen, who's connected to a Lord who has some peripheral connection to the case (old boys' network sticking together) and also in the way that much of the action - initially at any rate - is confined to a single, tastefully furnished dwelling. Also the opening, almost a version of Kafka, in which a man is accused of a crime that isn't even specified, must have suited Losey, who was booted out of his own country as part of the McCarthy Witch Hunt. Plays also slightly on the fact that the Kruger character is 'foreign', an 'artist', 'different' (an American in England).

Considering it was only a year after John Mills and Slyia Syms were censored for rolling around in the desert in Ice Cold in Alex, it features a quite risqué sex scene, for its time.

Losey's in the good company of Powell/Pressburger alumni Christopher Challis and Reginald Mills. Robert Flemying's in it as well. And Jack MacGowran.

Micheline Presle will be 100 in August. She has been working steadily, mainly in France, since the 1930s.

Dreamboat (1952 Claude Binyon & scr)

From story 'Love Man' by John D Weaver. College professor Clifton Webb is in danger of losing his teaching job when it's discovered he was once a silent movie star. He and his repressed daughter Anne Francis journey to New York to have the show canceled, which is hosted by his former co-star, Ginger Rogers. Jeffrey Hunter woos the young lady, Elsa Lanchester is a professor who yearns for Webb, Fred Clark is the producer (Move Over Darling, Boys' Night Out, The Solid Gold Cadillac, How to Marry a Millionaire and Sunset Blvd, as 'Sheldrake').

The 'don't mention the dumb bits' part: A. Any college would become more popular if one of its professors was a former silent film star. B. Rogers we learn is minted so doesn't need the TV show at all.

Animated ad for 'Penetroleum' hair product is hilarious. Amusing moment where Webb fights off attacker in bar by copying his own moves on-screen. Surreal ending in which he becomes a star again, watching himself in Sitting Pretty!

Fox. Milton Krasner, Cyril Mockridge.

    

This Is Us - Season 3 (2018 Dan Fogelman)

Deja (Lyric Ross) has me in tears from episode 1 on. Then in 3, when three Kates share a dream sequence, with dad (Milo Ventimiglia), it just blows you away. 

It's so fucking clever, the plotting, the cross-cutting. Thus we later have two Vietnams: Jack's and Kevin's, and where Kevin in Vietnam passes his dad going the other way. A wonderful puzzle.

I took almost exactly the same screen shot last time!

There's a moment here where a Vietnam buddy holds his hands either side of Jack's face - he then transfers this to the kids in moments of crisis.

Season 3 ending highlight: Deja takes Randall to one of her foster homes, where five of them would share a tin of soup while the owners put all their money on scratch cards. Then tells Randall he's won the lottery twice - once when he was adopted, the second in finding Beth - and to pull himself together.

Melanie Liburd is Beth's cousin and Kevin's girlfriend, Phylicia Rashad Beth's strict mum (The Cosby Show), Griffin Dunne Jack's brother.

Cinematographer: Yasu Tanida. 
Music: Siddhartha Khosla.
Editors: Bjørn Myrholt, Howard Leder, Susan Vaill (in rotation) and Julia Grove (2 eps).

Fat City (1972 John Huston)

One of Conrad Hall's own favourites. He adopted a very naturalistic low light look, keeping the exposure the same interior and out - so external stuff looks over-exposed whilst those dark bars and training rooms remain dark. You'll find no blue skies in this film. The opening montage of the real people of Stockton California were shot by him from a camper van.

The naturalism extends to the acting and fight scenes too. In particular the dialogue between trainers Nicholas Colasanto and Art Aragon is both realistic and funny, like they're an old married couple. Leonard Gardener's screenplay is elliptical - we don't see Jeff Bridges' continuing successes, it's just alluded too. (Huston had spotted Bridges in The Last Picture Show.) And Stacey Keach's relationship with Susan Tyrrell - she as pathetic but real a creation as Marion Bailey's drunk in All or Nothing - is utterly familiar and convincing (she received the film's only Oscar nomination.) Its fatalism is perhaps the most Hustonian thing about it.

Which is well caught in the dialogue:

"How do you like your steak?"
"I don't care."

And - "Did I get knocked out?"
"No - you won!"

Produced by Ray Stark (his own favourite of his films). Edited by Walter Thompson, supervising editor Margaret Booth.

When they leave the bar, he zips her up. I thanked him, but I'm not sure he heard me.

It was a flop. "I suppose the public found it too sad," Huston in summary.

Cool Hand Luke (1967 Stuart Rosenberg)

As soon as Lalo Schifrin's acoustic guitar theme starts, you're in familiar waters in classic sixties celebration of independence from institutionalism - how much it's like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in that respect, I had never considered before. Newman is fabulous and there's strong supporting cast led by George Kennedy. It's fun also watching how Conrad Hall tries to damp down those blue skies - and indeed, Newman's baby blues are noticeably absent too. Having just worked together on Harper, it may have been Newman who requested the cinematographer (they were together for Hall's last film The Road to Perdition).

There's possibly some deliberate religious subtext to this, but the ending - Newman being shot when he's at the supposedly safe place of a church - is decidedly anti-Establishment. Written by Frank Pierson and Donn Pearce, based on the latter's 1965 novel (Kesey's was published in 1962, but Pearce's is more autobiographically about his own terms in prison, an interesting life, see here.) Rosenberg had had a mass of TV experience, including episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone - this was his first feature film. He went on to The April Fools, WUSA (Newman, Woodward), Pocket Money (Newman and Marvin), The Laughing Policeman (Matthau), The Drowning Pool.

Without those last freeze frames of Newman's great smile we would have been left on something of a downer. Sam O'Steen cut it (he'd just started working with Mike Nichols). Kennedy won Oscar; Newman, Pierce/Pearson and Schifrin nominated

"Paul Newman was standing in line after he's been caught, and we had him in backlight.  When I went to shoot his close up I did it in backlight and I added fill so you could see his expression, but you couldn't really see his baby blues. The studio asked for a retake of the close up. I didn't realize why at first until the second time I did a retake and they said 'No, we want to see his baby blues, Conrad.' So I brought the light around  and slammed it in to Paul's face and made the close-up totally out of character with the master shot of the scene. They got their baby blues." (I have to say I was looking out for this and didn't see it.)
ASC magazine tribute issue, May 2003.

"I wish we'd been able to shoot it in black and white. I hadn't seen I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, but I saw it about six months ago - Jesus Christ, what a film! It's ten times better than Cool Hand Luke, and it's so right in black and white."
Conrad Hall in Leonard Maltin, 'The Art of the Cinematographer' 1971.

The Verdict (1982 Sidney Lumet)

Written by David Mamet, an engrossing Boston-set legal drama. Newman is the out-of-control, washed up drunk who goes after a Catholic hospital which has left a young woman a vegetable. He and his partner Jack Warden must face a huge legal team, led by James Mason, and deal with a disappearing witness (who no doubt has been paid off) and an entirely inimical judge (well played by Milo O'Shea - Theatre of Blood, Ulysses, Purple Rose of Cairo, Sacco e Vanzetti). A Charlotte Rampling complicates matters in sneaky turn of events, in good story, well acted.

Nicely photographed by Andrjez Bartkowiak, didn't take in Johnny Mandel's music at all. Edited by Peter Frank, with Lumet having designed a lot of shots to be covered in masters.

The Seven-Ups (1973 Philip D'Antoni & prod)

Had long wanted to see this because of the title and Roy Scheider - TPTV broadcast it in Fuzzorama. At that early credit 'Associate Producer and Supervising Film Editor Jerry Greenberg' I commented that 'Dede's boys were everywhere' but it wasn't until the end that we realised the film had been edited by Stephen A Rotter, who we were due to Zoom with the very next day! (John Horger also worked on it, Angelo Corrao was an assistant, as was Cynthia Scheider, then Roy's wife, who also cut Breaking Away).

Initially somewhat confusing tale is actually really well written, has an awesome car chase and two great thrillery scenes involving a car wash, of all things. Screenplay by Albert Ruben and Alexander Jacobs, story by Sonny Grosso, who was a New York detective and the subject of the book / film 'The French Connection', which D'Antoni produced.

Scheider is great as usual. The other Seven-Ups are Victor Arnold, Jerry Leon and Ken Kercheval. Tony Lo Bianco is the cop's childhood friend and snitch, Larry Haines one of the Mafiosi, Richard Lynch is the scary killer.

The striking music is by Don Ellis, photographed by Urs Furrer in a dingy NYC.

Steve later gave us some background. He was brought in by Jerry Greenberg to work on it and then as it progressed was let go. He went down to Florida to visit his family and then got a call, 'Do you want to come back as an assistant?' His Mum said 'Don't go. If they want you to be the editor they should ask you' but Steve decided he would go back. He didn't rate his work on it. He said there was a little 'bip' audible whenever there was a cut and he said he'd cut it so much that the sound was 'bip-bip-bip-bip-bip' constantly. 'I got better on my next picture.' Agreed the car chase was difficult to shoot and loved the stunt where the driver goes into the back of the truck. He explained that the top of the car had been sawn almost through and when the driver hit it, he dropped into a roll cage to protect himself.

Home From the Hill (1960 Vincente Minnelli)

One of those colour widescreen fifties dramas we're so fond of (actually debuted in March 1960), written by Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch from a novel (of course) by William Humphrey.

Robert Mitchum is the big man around the Texas place, Eleanor Parker (Detective Story) his unloving wife, George Hamilton their impressionable son and George Peppard a sort of loyal family retainer. Hamilton falls for Luana Patten and hunts a wild boar (not necessarily in that order) and there's a dangerous place full of yellow smoke and quicksand, which you think will play a part in the finale but doesn't. Milton Krasner's crew are happy driving around in jeeps in the woods performing lateral tracking shots and catching that yellow smoke.

Everett Sloane is the girl's offended father, and there's a particularly good score from Bronislau Kaper. Edited by Howard Kress. MGM.

Rachel, Rachel (1968 Paul Newman)

A bold and unusual choice for Newman's debut, based on the novel 'A Jest of God' by Margaret Laurence. It comes over as very European, Bergmanesque, ahead of its time. Joanne Woodward is of course fantastic as a confused, becalmed woman who just needs to get away and find something new in her life (away from her mother, preferably).

He is wonderfully supported of course by Dede Allen (they would have met on The Hustler) who magically helps unite her lives past and present (and imagined). Well, I say 'magically', but in fact it's an adroit mixture of sound and vision - editing, in fact. It's Robert Altman's Images, four years earlier. 

Nell Potts as the younger version is indeed Joanne and Paul's daughter (one of them). With Estelle Parsons, James Olson, Kate Harrington (the mother), Donald Moffat. Music: Jerome Moross, photography: Gayne Rescher. Stewart Stern, who co-authored Rebel Without a Cause, wrote it, and was Oscar nominated, as were Woodward (Streisand and Hepburn K. tied), Parsons and Newman for Best Picture (he did win the Golden Globe for Best Director, and she for Dramatic Actress).

Future Oscar-winning editor Alan Heim is the sound editor, and the ever-present Dick Vorisek the re-recordist.

John Q (2002 Nick Cassavetes)

Father holds ER at gunpoint to save his son. Man vs. US Healthcare injustice. Tense and tender. 

Denzel Washington, Robert Duvall, James Woods, Anne Heche, Kimberly Elise, Ray Liotta (who died suddenly last weekend), David Thornton, Laura Harring, Kevin Connolly, Shawn Hatosy, Ethan Suplee, Heather Wahlquist (the 'blonde'), Troy Winbush, Eddie Griffin (the cool one).

Good ensemble stuff once siege starts. Good twisty ending.

Edited by Dede Allen (one of her last films) with Tom as one of the sound mixers. Photographed by Rogier Stoffers, written by James Kearns.

Hud (1963 Martin Ritt)

I decided we needed a Paul Newman retrospective, and this was well overdue. He is an uncaring, rebellious bastard in this, who almost bonds with his nephew Brandon de Wilde (Shane) and has a clearly terrible relationship with his father Melvyn Douglas. Patricia Neal the housekeeper tolerates him until he tries to rape her.

From Larry McMurtry source novel, it feels similarly melancholic as The Last Picture Show, and they're both about the passing of the old ways; in this case, foot and mouth destroys Douglas's cattle farm and whole way of life - what good are oil wells, he asks, when you can't feed them and look after them and breed them?

Newman and Neal are both great - she won the Oscar, he lost to Poitier in Lilies of the Field. James Wong Howe's splendid widescreen photography also won, as did Douglas. The screenplay is by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who wrote the earlier Ritt film The Long, Hot Summer. The music's by Elmer Bernstein, with some lovely acoustic guitar passages. Paramount.

The Long, Hot Summer (1958 Martin Ritt)

The first of five collaborations between Martin Ritt and Paul Newman (the others being Paris Blues, Hud, The Outrage, and Hombre... hmm.. must watch these again), a melodramatic adaptation of various works by William Faulkner. Ritt had been an assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio where most of the cast came from; Newman received Best Actor at Cannes. This is where he and Joanne Woodward were reunited (they had met on a Broadway production of Picnic). (Ritt next did another Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, again with Woodward, opposite Yul Brynner.)

I enjoyed it, from a distance. Alex North's score is fine, Joe LaShelle's Deluxe Cinemascope photography fine. Rest of cast: Orson Welles, Lee Remick, Anthony Franciosa (Career), Angela Lansbury, Richard Anderson (The Six Million Dollar Man and lots of TV). It has kind of a weird ending in which Welles' patriarch suddenly develops some soul and everything ends up OK - not what I was expecting at all (thought at least one person would be killed).

I've just gone down a Paul Newman rabbit hole. 

I liked it when he suggests to Woodward that as a kid she probably had a doll with no head. I rather like that line and wondered if it was Faulkner's.

PB: What was Martin Ritt like directing The Long, Hot Summer?

OW: Well. he's the one who said to me, "I want you to relate to the windows," and I said, "Marty, you mean you want me to look at them?" But I enjoyed very much working with Joanne Woodward - we had nice scenes together - and Angela Lansbury. I love her. But I wasn't very happy, although the picture was an enormous success. That's the one where the critic of the New York Times [Bosley Crowther] wrote "Orson Welles, believe it or not, was quite good" (laughs).

'This Is Orson Welles' (1992).

Liberty Heights (1999 Barry Levinson & scr)

Jewish brothers in Baltimore, 1954, era of fine automobiles, including a 'Green mist' coloured cadillac.

Ben Foster falls for black girl in class Rebekah Johnson (who's also in As Good As It Gets), Adrian Brody for a spoiled rich girl, Carolyn Murphy. Neither of these are dealt with in a clichéd manner - the young black girl, for example, proves to be extremely loyal and brave. Their dad Joe Mantegna gets in trouble over his numbers racket (honestly, no one invests in 13, and also to put odds on the square root of minus one is just crazy), putting him in a situation with criminal Orlando Jones. There's a lot of nice observation of the culture of the times and the way alliances are formed between different cultural groups. And it's quite auto-biographical - "A lot of things happened to my cousin Eddie, like dressing up as Adolph Hitler on Halloween" he's quoted as saying. And there's those trademark Levinson Diner conversations.

There's a weird connection to the Baltimore-set The Wire, in that David Simon sent his 'Homicide' work to Levinson, who chose to produce it as a series, which led on to Simon's TV career.

With David Krumholtz, Bebe Neuwirth. Beautifully photographed by Chris Doyle, music by Andrea Morricone (Ennio's son), edited by Stu Linder.

Ed. From Wikipedia: 'The numbers game, also known as the numbers racket, is a form of illegal gambling or illegal lottery played mostly in poor and working class neighborhoods in the United States, wherein a bettor attempts to pick three digits to match those that will be randomly drawn the following day. '

This Is Us - Season 2 (2018 Creator Dan Fogelman)

Here's one of William's 'Poems for my Son', recounted in Episode 1: 

Things not said,
Advice
Not given.
Envelopes
Not stamped.
Regrets
Enveloping me.
Is it easier there?
I wonder.
I ponder
I guess.
Guess.
Do you think of me
As I do of you?
My son.
My son.
My son.
The things you'll do
I'll never know,
The pain
The secrets
Oh, to be given a chance
A start
The restart
The fresh start.
Will love come for you
As it did for me?
Find you
Wreck you
Save you
Change you?
And if life breaks for you
The way it would not
Break for me
If love hunts you
Finds you
Captures you,
Would you hold it tight
Nurture it
Protect it?
I hope you will.
I hope you can.
This father's advice
Is not required
It has no call
So instead
I'll share some
From another.
It's better to have loved
And lost
Than to never have loved
At all.
Now an addendum
To my earlier advice.
If I'm so lucky
To still have your ear.
I loved you.
I lost you.
And I advise you
'Twas better
Than to have never
Loved at all.
But now with more years
More time
More perspective
I see things in a slightly new way.
So here,
My good son,
Is a father's advice.
Updated and recalled.
It's better to have loved and lost
Surely.
But try
Not to lose it.

Also loved Randall's line to Kevin: "No black man would ever feel jealous about being auctioned." 

Two sets of Big 3s:

Logan Shroyer, Parker Bates, Mackenzie Hancsicak, Hannah Ziele, Niles Fitch, Lonnie Chavis. 

Q thinks that in order to maintain their correct ages, all the scenes involving the Big 3 at any age all had to be filmed at the same time - thus all the story had to have been worked out right at the beginning - which is quite a head spinner.

This is the season that introduces us to the troubled Deja (Lyric Ross), and also features a trio of consecutive stories about the Big 3, one each, centring around the day Kevin shattered his football dreams (and his knee). And we finally get to see the untimely death of Jack.

The sequences (over more than one episode) showing the young boy who is to be adopted is a marvellous piece of misdirection, as we find out we're in the future.

We noticed Master of None's Lena Waithe and Pam Grier in small parts.

Grace: Dead Tomorrow (2022 Kate Saxon)

As usual, Mr Multi-Strand Lewis elegantly weaves a number of plotlines around a gang who pick up illegal immigrants promising them a bright future, only to then remove their organs for sale! Very nasty, but luckily Grace works it out, and incriminates a senior surgeon or two.

Seham Aar, Faith Alabi, Richie Campbell, John Simm, Zoe Tapper, Stephen Boxer (surgeon).

This Is Us - Season One (2016 Creator Dan Fogelman)

Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Sterling Brown, Chrissy Metz, Justin Hartley, Susan Kelechi Watson, Chris Sullivan, Ron Cephas Jones (who was in the Ryan Gosling Half Nelson, as well as Sweet and Lowdown, but not The Wire, as my charming co-watcher contests).

It has great audacious moments of time jump, for example when we meet older mom Rebecca... but she's no longer with Jack... what's happened?

Great moment between Kevin's dodgy actor girlfriend Olivia, played by Janet Montgomery, and William:

Olivia: "How does it feel to be dying?"

There's a great slow beat from Ron Cephas Jones, before he says:

"It feels... like all these beautiful pieces of life are flying around me and I'm trying to catch them. When my grand-daughter falls asleep in my lap, I try to catch the feeling of her breathing against me. And when I make my son laugh, I try to catch the sound of him laughing, how it rolls up from his chest. But the pieces are moving faster now and I can't catch them all. I can feel them slipping through my fingertips. And soon where there used to be my grand-daughter breathing and my son laughing there will be... nothing."

"Oh."

"I know it feels like you have all the time in the world, but you don't. So stop playing it so cool, catch the moments of your life, catch them while you're young, and quick, because sooner than you know it, you'll be old and slow, and they'll be no more of them to catch. And when a nice boy who adores you offers you pie, say thank you."

Great moment where the family find the obstetrician who delivered the twins in hospital having suffered from a car accident, and Randall gives him a snow globe.

William's return to Memphis, featuring Brian Tyree Henry, and death, memorable, as is Randall's dream that Jack and William met, William's last postcard to Beth - 'the daughter I never had'. Strong Elizabethtown vibes here. Kevin's play "Where once stood a Manny now stands a man!" That long single take argument at the end.

Alexandra Breckenridge (Virgin River) plays Kevin's ex. Mandy Moore was initially a singer / songwriter so we can be reasonably certain that she performs her own numbers.

Originally made for NBC in the US, broadcast here first on Channel 4, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Dudley Randall, highly regarded black poet.

That's the first 18 episodes done, anyway.

Harry and Tonto (1974 Paul Mazursky & co-scr)

A homeless man wanders around a wintry America (with his cat) in search of relatives and a place to live, meets various characters en route, finally puts down roots in the sun. Good, whimsical, enjoyable entertainment, doesn't really end up anywhere story-wise.

Art Carney (won the Oscar), Ellen Burstyn, Herbert Berghof, Philip Bruns, Cliff de Young, Josh Mostel, Melanie Mayron, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Barbara Rhoades, Chief Dan George as medicine man: "I can cure anything! What's bursitis?"

Co-written with Josh Greenfeld, photographed by Michael Butler. The music is a bit of a let down. The editor is Richard Halsey. who's still working but sadly not on anything interesting since Edward Scissorhands, Joe versus the Volcano, Beaches, Down and Out in Beverley Hills, Moscow on the Hudson, American Gigolo, Rocky, Next Stop Greenwich Village, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.