Problem: positive
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Answer: It takes a very special kind of person to make a movie that is so wretched, beguiling, disgusting and repulsive, but make it in a way that also makes it brilliant and the quintessence of personal cinematic liberation. Crispin Glover, in all of his "out there" antics and predispositions, truly made something that is unique. In a world that has become starkly partisan, this film seems to evade the standard lines of creativity and art and effectively startle everyone.

Right off the bat, the film takes on a rather distant paradigm (if there really is a model at all) and initially shapes it with the likes of Shirley Temple in front of a swastika and naked women pleasuring a man with cerebral palsy. It's rather shocking stuff, but if you had the opportunity for the Q&A sessions after the screenings, it clearly opens up a bag of worms that leaves you wondering whether this is art or just the lowest common denominator. In either guise, you sense the tremor that this film will ultimately cause. It will never be accepted, not even by the supposed auteurs of the world who boringly speak about the human condition. You may not like it, but it is certainly something worth watching.

Problem: positive
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Answer: ....Rather well done, actually--attack the evil villains in their lair, stop a Little Big Horn style ambush, save the day via the waterboys' bugling, works for me. Stiff Upper British lip and all that.

So how does it play on a DVD 66 years later? Struck me as being like a Western, subbing Apaches or Sioux for the Thugs, and the US Cavalry for the Imperial British Army. It's very Colonial in it's outlook, you know? White Man's burden and all that? Kipling certainly would have approved.

Cary Grant, Fairbanks and MacLaglen play it as broadly as possible, putting some buddy buddy slapstick into the mix between the shootings and brawlings for good measure. (I had no idea it was Joan Fontaine as the token army wife--did they leave some of her scenes on the cutting room floor? very short-) None of them were aiming for an Oscar here--in fact Grant was not at his best in a few scenes--but sod it, it still works. And where else would Ben Casey wind up as an Indian bugler? Only in Hollywood.

Def. check this out if you like adventure and pseudo-Western style antics. It was done by a bunch of pros, well I might add.

*** outta ****

Problem: positive
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Answer:
British comedies tend to fall into one of two main types: the quiet, introspective, usually romantic study and the farcical social satire. Settings, characters, and concepts vary but certain characteristics place the vast majority of shows into one of the two categories. Butterflies is perhaps the epitome of the first type.

The scripts are very verbal, including long interior monologues by the main character Ria, a basically happy but unsettled housewife curious about what she might have missed out on when she embarked on a thoroughly conventional life. When she meets a successful but clumsy and emotionally accessible businessman (who makes his interest in her quite clear), she toys with the idea of finding out what the other path might have offered.

The acting and scripts are always on the money, which makes one's reaction to the show almost entirely a personal one: I was neither blown away by it nor turned off. My mother, on the other hand, adored this show. I think the degree to which one identifies with Ria's dilemma is the most important factor in determining one's reaction to Butterflies.