Originally show in 3-D, this vigorous little shocker has another psychotic role for price as a magic-trick inventor who goes over the edge when fellow magicians rip off his act and his wife runs off with a younger rival. There’s much play with Vincent’s latest gizmo but the piece as a whole is a few notches down in content and style from the previous years “House of wax”.
The four Marx Brothers as stowaways trying to bull their way through immigration by pretending to be Maurice Chevalier (each hopefully doing an impersonation to prove it), then crashing a Long Island society party to saw havoc. With Monkey Business, their first screen original, the team cast caution to the winds, helped by a perky script (”tell me, has your grandfather’s beard got any money?’ - Monkey? Why it fell hair to a fortune and some lunatic sight gags. Thelma Todd provides Groucho with his most delectable and intelligent foil.
Figuratively, the story about the length of drop on the rope: a man in an East Bourne hotel is seemingly rescued from suicide by a young girl. With the Grand Hotel setting, intermingling of past and present (real or imagined), shifting levels of ‘reality’, and the use of the out-of-sea-son resort as a symbol for inner desolation, it is not hard to see the influence of Resnais. And such pretensions are surprisingly welcome after the sub-11 plus level of most pity that the film’s central relationship cannot sustain credibility: the plot depends on too much verbal exposition; explanations are too predictable fro an essay on uncertainly; and the characters move from clinched stodgy middle-age and free-wheeling youth to stereotyped fugitives from deadening routine.
On the eve of his 65th birthday, media magnate William Parrish (Hopkins) feels heart tremors giving him notice to quit. In the meantime, he tells daughter Susan (Forlani) that her fiancé, his right-hand man Drew (Weber), is not quite right for her, which she too realizes when sparks fly with a complete stranger in a New York café. After they part, she fails to notice him being run over and killed; even so, she’s still surprised when he turns up at her father’s house for dinner. In fact, Death (Pitt) has arrived in town for a look around. He’s using the young man’s body and has chosen Hopkins as his guide. Four writers have adapted Mitchell Leisen’s 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday and spun it out to three hours. The result is seductively luxurious, with Hopkins bringing authority to his portrait pf a man facing his end, and Pitt teasingly enigmatic as the force of mortality in human guise. But the drama’s various elements – fantasy thriller, romantic fable, corporate shootout, family reconciliation -fail to pull together, and the interminable finale is simply soft in the head.