Reviews

I just saw this movie over the weekend and I'd say it was among the best movies I've seen this year. No car crashes, no explosions, no pretentious annoying heroes, no half-baked two-dimensional villains, and no computer graphics. Just a simple coherent plot with a few relatively normal characters with whom you would not mind spending an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon. The acting is good and it has a fairly nice soundtrack, especially if you like operatic tenors (by the way, why doesn't IMDb do a better job with soundtrack listings, missing here entirely, for example). It may not be profound, but it doesn't have a nasty bone in its body. You could do considerably worse at the megaplex.

A young woman, fresh from school, returns to her hometown in Wyoming in the 1890's to become a school teacher. When she arrives she finds her childhood home run down and her father intimidated by a businessman who wants to acquire his property and who soon has her father killed by a hired gunman. Unable to get justice from the corrupt local town authorities, she turns to crime aided by a gang of misfits and criminals. As the movie, told in retrospective, opens she is about to be hanged for murder. Turgid melodrama? No, a lighthearted, music-filled and thoroughly sweet comedy. The movie is presented as a ballad with balladeers Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole as the strolling minstrels who tell the story in song and are always welcome when they return on screen. Lee Marvin, as has been (mostly) noted here, is outstanding, elevating the movie from a forgettable mild entertainment to something more by his remarkable and very likable performance as the mostly off-the-wagon, past his prime gunman hired by Cat. Jane Fonda is sweet and very pretty in the title role, and the entire cast, particularly Dwayne Hickman and Tom Nardini in supporting roles, is likable and a pleasure to watch. The movie takes a tone of lighthearted parody and maintains it consistently throughout. The scene where Marvin's gunman, Kid Shelleen, dresses for his final encounter with the villain Strawn is wonderful and alone is worth the price of admission. None of it is meant to be taken seriously; just watch and enjoy.

What an entertaining movie this is. The plot is believable; the acting, from the minor characters right up to and including the leads, is excellent; the dialogue is natural and realistic (and intelligible); and the special effects have aged well and are quite good, as good as today's CGI stuff. But unlike today's sf movies, it's not the f/x that play the central role here but rather plot, character, and acting.

I can understand some of the comments about some of the movie's science, particularly in the way earth gravity suddenly appears inside buildings and the way people's cranial cavities literally expand like balloons when exposed to near zero pressure, but none of that is central. I'm pleased when I see real science in movies (maybe surprised would be a better term), but if I want science I can read a textbook. Anyway, this shortfall is more than made up for by having a doctor in the movie named Lazarus - over scientific accuracy I'll take a little humor. Or good dialogue, such as when O'Neil, having just chased a perp through half the installation, finally corners him in a kitchen, gets the drop on him, and leveling his shotgun at his desperate kitchen knife-wielding opponent says to him, 'Think it over'.

Comparisons have been made to other movies like High Noon and sf classics like Alien and 2001. I'll leave 2001 go at least until I can figure out how that giant fetus got out there in outer space, but as to Alien, well, in my view Outland compares quite well despite Alien's iconic status. Alien conveys all the niceness of a vat of sulfuric acid. What a bunch of dismal characters inhabited that movie. Outland has a different feel to it and portrays more than a few positive human characteristics (the interaction between O'Neil and his wife is quite affecting although, or maybe because, it takes place via a video screen). And as to this being a 'remake' of High Noon set in outer space, well, it really isn't. In fact there's only one aspect of the plot that is similar (the first half of Outland is a whodunit), though the device of periodically showing a clock to countdown when the bad guys will arrive is of course an obvious imitation. Someone else said that this movie is actually a 'western', and that's true if you mean a movie with a real hero who stands virtually alone despite the odds on the side of right vs. wrong (though he does get a little help especially from one particular rather brave woman). Basically though, this is just a very good movie that makes good use of and occasionally even exceeds the limits of its genre. It's got plenty of action and suspense and not a single dead spot. It's worth seeing.

Judging by most of the reviews on these pages and elsewhere, one might think this movie was a minor masterpiece, some deep insightful exploration of the American family. It is not. It is a pointless, meandering depiction of self-destructive and fairly uninteresting people. There's hardly a plot to speak of, and the acting, while OK, is nothing spectacular. The characters portrayed in this film are the kind of people you probably would not want to spend five minutes with were they real people, so why pay money to spend an hour and a half with them in a movie theater? (That, by the way, is the review. But IMDb seems to think that one cannot say something worth publishing in less than 10 lines.)

No, they don't make them like this anymore, but fortunately you can still rent a copy or better yet go see it in a theater somewhere. Cary Grant is very good as the baffled ad exec being chased by, and chasing, international spies in a case of mistaken identity. He never loses his cool and manages to shift effortlessly between comic and serious, making it all look easy. Good casting all around except maybe for Jessie Royce Landis who plays Grant's mother - not that she's bad in the role, but she doesn't quite look the part owing, perhaps, to the fact that she was actually younger (by 10 months) than Grant. Movie audiences back then took Grant to be ageless, I suppose, and perhaps he was. James Mason is good as the suave villain.

The best screen performance ever by George C. Scott. The screenplay by Chayefsky, the irony-freighted dialogue, is near perfect ('Just where do you train your nurses, Dachau?'). Rigg is wonderful as the rescuing angel who saves Scott from doom, as is the whole cast. It's a hilarious and serious movie. It is a movie of the period, the 60's, but it is not in any sense dated. What it is about, the chaos and irrationality of the system vs. the sanity of the individual, is timeless. And the "We heal nothing. We cure nothing" monologue (delivered, shouted actually, as no one else but Scott could) with its references to cloning and other 'wonders' of modern science could literally have been written this morning.

The acting is superb, the characters carrying such verisimilitude that you may literally think you are watching a real life drama unfold. (Oddly, the least convincing character in the movie is that of Judge Weaver played by Joseph Welch, the real life attorney who represented the Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings.) And like real life the plot issues are subtle. It's totally satisfying as a courtroom drama while at the same time the final outcome leaves one with something to think about, which is in itself pretty unusual. It's a movie about people and about the law, each as they really are. Highly entertaining and recommended. The jazzy musical score is by Duke Ellington, who makes a cameo appearance.