Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, both actors, scored a lot of points in directing the 1996 Big Night, for which they chose an easygoing but not too slow pace, dabs of effective slow mo, wise medium shots of people, and Felliniesque dramatics.  They both act in the film too, and Tucci, talented guy, co-wrote the original screenplay, which has to do with the efforts of Italian brothers to keep their traditional Italian restaurant afloat in the big-city America of the 1950s.  Sadly, one of the brothers has given up all integrity.  He is desperate, even betraying his pleasant girlfriend (Minnie Driver).  A novel idea obtains, then: i.e., moral compromise takes place so that compromise with cuisine (traditional Italian) might be eschewed.  Not that the filmmakers condone this compromise, you understand; they don’t.  But it does go on.

Honest and endearing, Big Night is one of the cinematic big deals of ’96.

(All reviews are by Earl Dean)

The 1971 film Such Good Friends, by Otto Preminger, is like a comic An Unmarried Woman with a sick and dying husband.  The wife of this husband, Julie (Dyan Cannon), firmly and understandably sees her marriage to Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) as a good one.  But then his health starts failing badly before Julie’s obsession with his welfare is supplanted by anguish over the relationship per se.  At first—and at later moments too—the film is a sex comedy, presently turning into a comedy plain and simple: one with pathos.

The script is by Elaine May (using the pseudonym of Esther Dale), adapting a novel by Lois Gould, and there are trenchant, witty lines.  Occasionally, however, the flick is distasteful:  I don’t want to see James Coco in his underwear waiting to be fellated.  Friends, further, can be preposterous. . . Dyan Cannon does not flesh out her character memorably, as do Coco and Ken Howard.  The music, too, sometimes fails to cut it.  I disagree with the internet reviewer who found the film dull, but it is my opinion that, in spite of its several pleasures, Such Good Friends is forgettable.  

The writer Larry Woiwode knows America to be a land that will never truly renounce Christianity both Catholic and Protestant, and this is glowingly reflected in his fiction about the Neumiller family of North Dakota.

Much of this fiction is in the form of short stories like “The Suitor”, whose protagonist, Martin Neumiller, proposes marriage to Alpha Jones.  Martin is a Catholic Christian who receives bad vibes from Alpha’s feisty, drunken father and shortsighted Protestant mother; but the standard attachment to a major institution—i.e. marriage—brings resolution.  The parents are happy their daughter was proposed to.

The incidents in “Marie” take place many years later, after Alpha has passed on and Martin intends to remarry.  Marie is the youngest child of the couple:  she has grown up without a mother and knows she cannot possibly fill the woman’s shoes for the family (“I can’t do anything right”).  Yet, as Marie points out, she is the one who’s alive, she is here, albeit Woiwode demonstrates his firm belief in God by making it seem that Alpha Neumiller is not really a person of the past.  Somehow she lives too, her death not looked at through a nihilistic lens.

Woiwode is a man of faith whose prose is soothingly subtle and gently penetrating.

“The Suitor” and “Marie” can be found in his book The Neumiller Stories.

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