I'd never heard of screenwriter Laura Levine before I watched this movie but I thought to myself that it was Manhattan to Clapham Junction that she was a television writer. Sure enough! All but one – this one! – of her numerous credits are for her contributions to some TV series. Probably "One Hell of a Guy" was also slated for TV but her agent sold it to the short-lived 7.23 Productions instead. How can I tell? The script is divided into segments. In my day, the segments had to be exactly 7 minutes in length, plus three minutes for commercials and station identification. No tolerance was allowed whatever. If a segment ran over 7 minutes, it had to be trimmed. If it ran less, some inconsequential dialogue had to be added. Another pointer was that the main characters – usually three or four – had to be on screen almost continuously and assigned lots of close-ups rather than two-shots. The only good thing about TV writing is that it doesn't discriminate against aged performers the way movies now do. Thus it was good to see Anne de Salvo in a major role in "One Hell of a Guy", despite her position way down the cast list. On the other hand, the segments themselves were a varied bunch. Some were entertaining, some were overloaded with inconsequential dialogue, others were plain boring especially those in which Michael York figured so repetitively, and those in which Rob Lowe and Alexandra Powers dominated the screen whilst they exchanged inconsequential chit-chat. York's scenes are so lacking in fire power, they were probably all filmed in a single day.
Review of One Hell of a Guy
