Q: Producer Joel Schumacher who also directed "Phone Booth",'02, and many other great films showed in great detail how no one person can really be trained to be a killing machine with out destroying their own personalities and the real fears that a person has to face when going into COMBAT!! Colin Farrell(Roland Bozz),"Intermission",'03, gave one of his best performances and actually carried this entire picture on his back. Matthew Davis(Jim Paxton),"Blue Crush",'02, gave a great supporting role and Shea Whigham(Pvt.Wilson),"All The Real Girls",'03, showed his true acting skills in the role that he played. There was two brief scenes where the soldiers were able to find some hot romance on a short leave in the local town and had to pay for their love and sexual desires. One Army Veteran instructor from Viet Nam told the soldiers how to really torture the enemy by using electrical wires in all the wrong places on a human male body. Enjoyable and entertaining film to view.
A: positive
Q: Having previously seen the abridged print presented by David Shepard, I finally got a hold of a complete--or nearer complete version, which was about 56 minutes compared to the 30-minute version more widely distributed. The Shepard print for Image Entertainment is certainly of superior quality, and the best parts are there, but it's nonetheless good to see the rest of the film and fill in some loose story ends.

In the Shepard print, the film ends with Mary stating, "You see, I've changed my mind--I'm never going home." Yet, in the complete version, Mary and Kenneth Driscoll end their relationship soon after that scene Mary returns home to the country and Driscoll rekindles his relationship with Vivian. This additional footage develops the character Vivian, who had little relevance in the Shepard version. Moreover, in the complete version, the film begins in the New Jersey countryside with Mary, where she reads and fantasizes about her ideal lover. She's disappointed by the reality of the advances by farm "chore boy" Johnny Applebloom (a character completely absent from the Shepard version), but after her affair with Driscoll, she returns to the country to presumably and eventually become a farmer's wife.

Regardless of the print, 'A Girl's Folly' is a good little film for 1917, made by one of the top directors of the 1910s Maurice Tourneur. In it, Tourneur takes plenty of jabs at his own business, including by playing a caricature of himself--the director of the film-within-the-film. The two leads also give quality performances by early screen-acting standards: Robert Warwick, an actor playing a skirt-chasing star, and Doris Kenyon, as an ingenue aspiring to play an ingenue on the screen.

Self-referential films, which made film-making the focus of the films, were nothing new by now. Mack Sennett had already parodied this type of film three years prior with 'Mabel's Dramatic Career'. Several aspects of this one stand out, though. Frances Marion's intertitles are humorous, including illustrations of the actors on a chessboard with a hand directing them--remarkable for 1917. I especially liked the film's final title cards where two observers remark on the film's happy ending: "Gee but ain't that romantick!" And, the other replies, "Romance, nuthin! That's movin' pictures!" Fellow female screenwriter Anita Loos made a similar self-referential conclusion to another film from 1917 'Wild and Woolly'. Both writers helped change the role of their professions in the business and art.

Some of the photography by Tourneur and John van den Broek is good, especially concerning the film-making business. The use of mirrors in several scenes is a nice reinforcement of the film's self-reflexivity. Furthermore, the editing is exceptional. The quick crosscutting during the studio scenes is especially salient; it serves to punctuate the hectic pace filmmakers work at, especially back then.
A: positive
Q: Ingrid Bergman is a temporarily impoverished Polish countess in 1900s Paris who finds herself pursued by France's most popular general and a glamorous count -- and that's on top of being engaged to a shoe magnate. Such is the failproof premise that entrains one of the most delirious plots in movie history. There are backroom political machinations by the general's handlers, a downed balloonist and ecstatic Bastille Day throngs, but the heart of this gorgeously photographed film is the frantic upstairs/downstairs intrigues involving randy servants and only slightly more restrained aristocrats. Yes, it's Rules of the Game redux. Before it's all over even Gaston Modot, the jealous gamekeeper in Rules, puts in an appearance -- as a gypsy capo, no less! Things happen a little too thick and fast toward the end, resulting in some confusion for this non-French speaker, but what the heck -- Elena and Her Men is another deeply humane Renoir masterpiece.
A: positive
Q: A thematic staple of cinema since its inception is that genre involving seductive women whose wiles and means entice susceptible men not only into their arms but also into dire circumstances that typically will only result in jeopardy for the male victims, along with incertitude as to whether or not temptresses will be forced to take their medicine, and here Susan Lucci performs as a siren, although her acting chops from a primarily soap opera pedigree are inadequate to make her performance a credible one. Isabelle (Lucci), inconstant wife of venture capitalist Stewart Collins (John O'Hurley), begins a love affair merely for fun with yacht salesman Richard Davis (Philip Casnoff), simply a bagatelle for her but an earnest matter of the heart for Richard, apparently mesmerized by his lover while she takes advantage of his ardour by engaging him in a risky plot that will graduate into a scheme of murderous intent. When Davis becomes convinced that guileful Isabelle is a victim of physical abuse administered by her husband, he desperately attempts to free her from what he feels is a marital trap in order that he may wed her himself, coming to believe that the only clear solution to his plight will be found in a rudimentary essay at hiring a professional assassin who will dispose of the allegedly violent Stewart. In the wake of the hit-man's assault upon Collins, a pair of police detectives, performed by Joe Grifasi and Dean McDermott, become increasingly curious concerning Isabelle's possible involvement in the crime, while at the same time reality dawns upon enraptured Richard who might have to pay a dear price in return for his inamorata's maneuvering. Lucci and Kasnoff are properly cast as a viable pair of conspirators, each giving a reading that makes for a boring rather than charming set of lovebirds, but O'Hurley and McDermott offer strong turns in a film that suffers from a hackneyed scenario as well as uninventive direction and design elements. Released upon a Fremantle DVD, this largely lustreless affair depicting a man 'neath the spell of a seductress does benefit from top-flight visual and sound quality, and although no extra features are provided, the above-average production quality enhances able efforts from cinematographer Robert Primes and composer Stephen Edwards.
A: negative