PLAYING BIG OR SMALL: FOR THE BOYS, RAMBLING ROSE
There's an old legend about when Jack Lemmon was appearing in his first movie, IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU, for director George Cukor. Lemmon, who came from the stage, was acting as if he was still on stage, and Cukor kept telling him to tone his performance down in take after take. Finally, Lemmon complained that if he did that, he'd be doing nothing, and Cukor said, "Exactly." Despite that, and the naturalistic style that soon overtook American actor, there has also been a time-honored tradition of playing characters in a larger-than-life style. The 1991 Best Actress raced featured polar opposites; the larger-than-life Bette Midler in FOR THE BOYS against the more naturalistic Laura Dern in RAMBLING ROSE.
Of course, Midler has always gone over-the-top, from comedies (RUTHLESS PEOPLE) to tearjerkers (BEACHES). Though she came up during the 70's, and is comfortable in the vulgar traditions of that decade, she's a throwback to the showbiz traditions of the 30's and 40's. It's easy to see why she'd be attracted to the material that FOR THE BOYS deals with (Marshall Brickman, Neal Jimenez, and Lindy Laub are the credited writers). But while Midler gives it her all, the material doesn't hold up.
We start out in present day, where Dixie Leonard (Midler, in awful old-age makeup) is set to be reunited with her former stage partner Eddie Sparks (James Caan) for a TV special. She, however, wants nothing to do with Sparks, and she tells the story of why to Jeff (Ayre Gross), a flunky who's there to take Dixie to the show. We then flashback to the 40's, where Dixie is a singer and dancer on a USO tour. Her uncle Art (George Segal) is the head writer for Eddie Sparks, and Art gets Eddie to see her one night. Entranced with her act, Eddie signs Dixie up to be his on-stage partner. The two loathe each other on sight, but on-stage, they have terrific chemistry. The film then becomes a look at their performing career, as they stay big hits performing for soldiers around Christmas time, while off-stage, they quarrel over just about everything.
I've never been a fan of Mark Rydell's directing work (acting is another story; he's done splendid work in films like THE LONG GOODBYE and HAVANA), and this film does little to change that. He inserts events like the McCarthy era and the Vietnam War, it seems, purely as an excuse for Eddie and Dixie to fight (for the former, Dixie gets riled when Eddie drops Art because he's being investigated by McCarthy, while for the latter, Dixie's son Danny (Christopher Rydell, the director's son) is killed in Vietnam). If the fighting was that interesting, this might be understandable, but Rydell doesn't give it any shape. None of this is helped by the fact that we never see Eddie perform except with Dixie, and he seems to go from just a minor cad to scumbag just for plot purposes (Caan's snake-in-the-grass charm is pretty much wasted here). Finally, during the Vietnam scenes, Rydell seems to be making an anti-war statement, but when it's disguised in sentimental hogwash like this, it's cheating.
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