Love Story (1970) moves fluidly and isn’t dated, but it pays so much attention to the two young lovers, Jenny (Ali MacGraw) and Oliver (Ryan O’Neal), and not much to the other characters, that it gets a bit stifling.  Neither lover is all that interesting, especially since Jenny is incessantly cynical and smirky with hardly a trace of amatory tenderness.

MacGraw, who was better in Goodbye Columbus, can’t really handle her.  She’s superficial—smug when she should be more than that.  O’Neal is passable, neither strong nor weak.

Erich Segal’s novel may have value, but the movie doesn’t.

Cover of Love Story

Virtually every stunt that can be done with a train and train tracks takes place in Buster Keaton‘s silent classic, The General (1926). There is something fascinating about one ancient train pursuing another ancient train (until one of them is destroyed), particularly when Keaton’s vigorous acrobatics are featured.

A Civil War comedy, herein Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer who is rejected as a Confederate recruit because he is deemed more valuable as an engineer than as a soldier. But Keaton becomes a soldier of sorts, entering the aforementioned pursuit, after scheming Yankees steal his train, “the General.” Less funny than the star’s shorter works, and overlong, The General is nonetheless a terrific comic adventure story, with derring-do at its jauntiest.

Because it’s a victory-for-the-losing side (the South) tale, Keaton’s film would be hated by the nefarious fools who wish to destroy all monument statues of Columbus, Washington, Lee and others, and by the U.S. political leaders who allow them to do so. They’re all philistines unaware of how, as has been pointed out, these statues fortuitously mark our progress as a nation.

Peter Graves enacts a federal investigator, Tom Kaylor, assigned to bust the supplier of illegal amphetamines in the film, Death in Small Doses (1957). He poses as a trucker because the “bennys” are being purchased by truckers intent on receiving pep for their long drives. But deaths are the consequence and the pushers are shady.

With acceptable direction by Joseph Newman. the movie is an almost too earnest entertainment item with energetic drama. Finally, though, it goes off a cliff; the writing by John McGreevey flops. Tom’s love interest, Val, is played by Mala Powers, a woman with an exquisite face and excellent breasts. However, the Val of the film’s first half is not at all consonant with the Val of the second half, and it hardly helps that Miss Powers plays her ineffectually. As for Graves, he fills the bill, but Chuck Connors is shallow. The thrills of the first two-thirds of Death made me glad I could see the picture on Amazon Prime.

I was deprived of the fifth season of the FX series, The Americans, for a long time until I found it on Amazon Prime. I have now watched the first four episodes of this the story of a Russian married couple living as spies, for the Kremlin, in America. The couple’s teenaged daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), is shaken and confused now that she knows what her parents do for a living, with Mom and Dad doing what they can to hide their occupational violence from the girl.

However dubious, here, some of the conduct and strategies of American and Russian operatives may be, Joe Weisberg‘s show is penetrating and compelling. A theme of the fifth season is the reality that powerful states such as the U.S. must struggle (or war) against failed or pathetic states. Think of Israel and Iran, or Israel and Saddam’s Iraq in 1981.

I like it that Weisberg has supplied The Americans with a fairly large number of characters. The focus is not too narrow. . . Most of these characters, incidentally, know how high the stakes are. Alarmingly high.

Cover of Tamara Drewe

I never saw the 2010 British film, Tamara Drewe, in the theatre, only on DVD.  That was sufficient, however, for letting me know that the problem with the film is that it reveals too little about its title character, Tamara Drewe.  Still, based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, the film is robust and sophisticated, and actress Gemma Arterton does all she can with Tamara.

Miss Drewe is a formerly unattractive gal who, after getting a nose job, returns to her rural town a real beauty, and then gets into some vexing scrapes with lovers and foes alike.  It’s probably one of Stephen Frears’s best.

Only 65% of critics recommend this film (source: Rotten Tomatoes on the Internet), but that scarcely matters.  Why?  Because most movie critics write claptrap.  In fact, usually they’re not even critics, they’re reviewers.  As John Simon indicated long ago, true criticism is written in such a way that it invites the reader to think, whereas the reviewer does the reader’s thinking for him or her.  That’s what they’ve done with Tamara Drewe, which in any case deserves better than a response of claptrap.