Reviews

I am the type whose aim is to see the best side of anything but seeing anything praiseworthy in this movie is a hard sale. I just can't see the purpose behind this movie even with Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse and Robert Webber starring in it. Just a near two hours of nothingness and a waste of time for viewers, the cast and producers of this time waster.

Don't waste your precious time trying to see what I saw.

For the life of me I just can't understand the overwhelming negative review of this movie. I can't think of a more underrated movie than Welcome To Hard Times. Probably this attitude boils down to those who cannot see beyond the joy and excitement of a gunfight to the reason for the fight in the first place.

I admit that I am not a professional movie expert and can lay no claim to the skills and wisdom of movie review other than being just a lay person who is a watcher and interpreter of stories told through movies.

I strongly urge those who have not watched the movie to lay aside these needlessly and distortingly malicious reviews and enjoy a truly great movie.

The movie, in my opinion, is an attempt to retell the original tale of Akira Kurosawa in the Seven Samurai of 1954 and subsequently retold in 1960 by John Sturges in The Magnificent Seven apparently to bring the story closer to home to indulge and appeal to Western viewers. Nevertheless, the story is the epitome of all Westerns of any era.

What makes these previous movies great is the central story of the underdog being forced to seek the help of the strong to defend against the threat of harm from outlaws. To me this is what makes Western movies great and attractive because of the central theme of protecting the weak and law-abiding citizenry against aggression from those who live by the law of the sword or gun in a game of survival of the fittest.

The movie starts with an introduction to the hamlet of Hard Times, a settlement of no bigger than 30 people with the single goal of surviving and thriving in building a society out of the aptly named small town. To their credit this community has a lawyer (I can't figure out, though, why Blue chose to settle in that sleepy hamlet, or perhaps because he was no longer practicing law or even being a fugitive from justice himself). The closest they have to a healthcare service is a native medicine man. There was no school as there was only a single school-aged child (Jimmy Fee).

In spite of this smallness, the people apparently were determined to form a thriving community and society in the spirit of North American European settlers. They apparently need to have a growing population from any corners. To me that community would gladly have welcomed Syrians and Afghans with open arms if the events told happened today.

To begin with, the entire town of Hard Times had no organized government, legal system or law enforcement and barely any social services apart from the saloon and a store.

This makes me wonder for how long has Blue (Henry Fonda) been living in this town and what legal practice could he establish as there was no formal government or a legal framework or even crime in the community up to this point. I dismiss this oddity to the fact that every settlement has to begin from somewhere and that was a starting phase for Hard Times.

During a sleepy afternoon, trouble came calling in the name of an outlaw (Aldo Ray) in the person of The man from Bodie whose outstanding contribution is the sheer size of the destruction he meted out to the community at will and the total silence and speechlessness he carried out the destruction in the entire movie.

He started by assaulting Molly (Janice Rule) and then her husband rose to her defense but stood no chance against the outlaw who inflicted a terminal injury on him which made Molly disdainful against the de factor lawman Blue for not standing up to the intruder against whom he had no legal basis for asking him to leave or even challenge him to a gun fight given his lack of legal status to act as a Sherriff and possibly considering his old age and, perhaps, his calculated lack of capacity to stand up against The Man from Bodie.

The man from Bodie left as suddenly as he came and that gave the community a period of respite to rebuild. Then came the territorial Governor's representative to formally establish a legal standing to the town and implying that Blue was now the new lawman in the town.

Life improved for the community with the arrival of Zar (keenan Wynn) with his contingent of girls to bring life to the community by opening a pub and night club to provide a social service.

Love started blooming between Bert Albany (Dan Ferrone) and Blossom (kelen Liu) bringing hope that the community will at last have its first born child.

Two most beautiful aspects of this story was during a cold Christmas morning the call girls in Zar's business celebrated Christmas by organizing a Church Service filled with happiness and hope for the community. The second memorable event was after the assault on Molly by The Man from Bodie, Blue took Molly in and nursed her in his house. He told Jimmy that when the town's people asked him how his mother was doing, they would be referring to Molly indicating that Blue was adopting Jimmy and providing home for Molly.

Life would start returning to normal and the community started rebuilding and then suddenly and unexpectedly The Man from Bodie returned.

Beautiful and outstanding movie by any standards. I rate it 10 out of 10 without taking a second thought.

Maddeningly pointless violence is what killed off martial arts movies in the 1980s. Bruce Lee, it cannot be argued, is the singular individual who opened our eyes to the beauty of martial arts with his movies in the early 1970s. Bruce Lee's stories, unlike those in the same genre that followed him, would have a slow build-up to a great fight towards the end of the movie. This is why his movies remain the standard of great martial arts movies to this day. The fate of subsequent generation of martial arts movies lavishly crowded with violence is now threatening Hollywood productions because of gratuitous depiction of violence.

Take a step back and consider both the first and second parts of the Godfather trilogy, arguably the best storyline ever put into film! What makes The Godfather so appealing is its depiction of implied, rather than expressed, violence. Truly! The director, Francis Ford Coppola, would later disclose that he and the script writer, Mario Puzo, were under tremendous pressure from the producers of the first movie to add more violence to the script or he, Coppola, risked being fired from completing the directing the movie. Those who have read the original novel by Puzo would agree that the book on which the story was based is much more suspenseful and entertaining than the movie even with less violence.

So it is that a great movie is not so much about the amount of TNT, pyrotechnics, blood and gore that are freely depicted but much more about the story of ordinary guys, in this case crooks and law enforcers, whose actions and plots are motivated by the mundane things in life that we can all relate to such as strained interpersonal relationships, debts, deadlines, job insecurity (as in the case of the two police officers in this story),etc. which make up the story - a great story, in my opinion.

To me this is a great movie told with measured and tamed violence. Granted that the story it aimed to tell should have been accompanied by other parallel stories criss-crossing the main plot over an added 30 minutes or so because at approximately 90 it came up too short for a good time frame.

The cast is great (Dennis Hopper, Seymour Cassel, Lolita Davidovich, Viggo Mortensen and, of course,Wesley Snipes who radically departs from the portrait of the apostle of gore like in the Blade trilogy earlier. The character played by Mr. Snipes is one we can all relate to and, thus, immerse ourselves in the story for maximum entertaining pleasure. Each one of the listed actors gave a better-than-average performance to make this movie one I expect to watch a few more times.

The soundtrack is great.

Like they say, you can spot a cockerel from the moment it is hatched, you can actually tell a great movie in the first ten minutes most of the time. Occasionally a movie comes along that builds slowly to a great climax at the very end. That is the hope that kept me through this excruciatingly boring attempt at film-making. I mean, who can tell me the point of this movie? Not once in the entire movie did anything so much as evoked a smile on my face yet they billed it as a comedy.

The title character is supposed to be suffering from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder but apparently no one taught the actor what a patient with OCD should look like. Hasn't the actor watched the title character in The Aviator? There is a flicker of ramance in the movie but in the end you wonder if Roger loves Florence or he is just feeling sorry for her. The part of the movie that featured an unplanned pregnancy and an abortion is so emotionally dry you could swear some other couple are involved not them. We are not even told who is the father of the baby but we can infer that it is Roger because Florence denied sleeping with the other guy. In spite of this, you do not see any emotions displayed by Roger or Florence before or after the abortion - this is so unreal for those who have actually been through this experience in real life.

Another totally incongruous piece in this movie is the caligraphy hanging on the wall of the home Roger was staying in. We are made to believe that this is a Jewish home yet the caligraphy is the Arabic script that translates to "In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful and the Most Beneficient". Well, if this was meant to be a subliminal message that is supposed to show that Jews and Arabs have a common ground, no mention of Islam or the presentation of an Arab character featured in this totally pointless movie.

In the end, the climax that I anticipated to give this movie a reason for being never materialized. I was left wondering what was it all about. This is clearly the kind of movie you should be watching in a blizzard when you are sure there are no taxis available and your home is far away.

I like The Counterfeit Contessa only for the last 25 minutes when the real Contessa made her entry. The rest of the movie is an unrealistic and boring effort. Granted that the title character wanted something so badly she was willing to live a lie to get it...or is that really the only way to get to her man? What are the motives of the other characters who aided her in her quest? Contessa Sofia di Sarzanello and Anthony Nordino gave life to this nice movie. Without them the movie is a crescendo of unrealistic acting culminating in the unconvincing cry scene by Gina Nordino at the end. In spite of this major weakness the movie is worth watching if only for the part played by the real Contessa.