Robert Eddison Movies
- 1993
- PG
Monty Python's Michael Palin plays an Oxford don with acute female trouble in American Friends. While on holiday in the Swiss Alps, Palin crosses the path of American tourist Connie Booth and her adopted daughter Trini Alvarado. Both women express an inordinate desire for the bookish Palin, leading to profound changes in the lives of all concerned. Michael Palin insists that the plot of American Friends was drawn from an actual incident in the life of his own great-grandfather. The film unfolds like a good novel; slow on the uptake, but fascinating once it gets going. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Michael Palin, Trini Alvarado, (more)
- 1989
- Add Campion: The Case of the Late Pig to QueueAdd Campion: The Case of the Late Pig to top of Queue
Peter Davison stars as bespectacled, aristocratic private detective Albert Campion in this two-part adaptation of Margery Allingham's novel The Case of the Late Pig. The title character is Roland Isidore "Pig" Peters (Mike Charles), a lifelong bully who had been Campion's principal tormentor during his school days in the early 1900s. Although Campion would just as soon never see Peters again, he accepts a curiously poetic invitation to "Pig"'s funeral. Three months later, a former girlfriend of Campion asks him to solve a recent murder -- and the victim is none other than "Pig" Peters, who apparently has died twice! Ingredients essential to the story include the wrong body (and wrong species) in Peters' coffin, a shady information peddler (played by Michael Gough, better known as Alfred the butler in the Batman theatrical films), and a handful of ice cubes. In America, "The Case of the Late Pig" was telecast October 12 and 19, 1989, as the first "Campion" story to appear on the PBS anthology Mystery! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Peter Davison, Brian Glover, (more)
- 1989
- PG13
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The third installment in the widely beloved Spielberg/Lucas Indiana Jones saga begins with an introduction to a younger Indy (played by the late River Phoenix), who, through a fast-paced prologue, gives the audience insight into the roots of his taste for adventure, fear of snakes, and dogged determination to take historical artifacts out of the hands of bad guys and into the museums in which they belong. A grown-up Indy (Harrison Ford) reveals himself shortly afterward in a familiar classroom scene, teaching archeology to a disproportionate number of starry-eyed female college students in 1938. Once again, however, Mr. Jones is drawn away from his day job after an art collector (Julian Glover) approaches him with a proposition to find the much sought after Holy Grail. Circumstances reveal that there was another avid archeologist in search of the famed cup -- Indiana Jones' father, Dr. Henry Jones (Sean Connery) -- who had recently disappeared during his efforts. The junior and senior members of the Jones family find themselves in a series of tough situations in locales ranging from Venice to the most treacherous spots in the Middle East. Complicating the situation further is the presence of Elsa (Alison Doody), a beautiful and intelligent woman with one fatal flaw: she's an undercover Nazi agent. The search for the grail is a dangerous quest, and its discovery may prove fatal to those who seek it for personal gain. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade earned a then record-breaking $50 million in its first week of release. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi
- Starring:
- Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, (more)
- 1987
Author Tom Sharpe's outrageous best-seller about the power struggle that emerges when the dean of a Cambridge University dies before naming his successor gets the big screen treatment in director Robert Knights' four-part comedy. Porterhouse College is an institute of higher education steeped in five hundred-years of tradition, so when the Head Master passes away and his reform-minded replacement Sir Godber Evans (Ian Richardson) arrives to take his place the staff is outraged. Head Porter Skullion (David Jason) in particular seems hell-bent on subverting Sir Evans' every decree. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
- Starring:
- David Jason, Ian Richardson, (more)
- 1954
The rundown British community of Islington is visited by a heavenly angel (Diane Cilento), sent down on a do-good mission. Her principal assignment is to soften the heart of a soulless pawnbroker (Felix Aylmer), and to that end appears in human form to do what the title says she does. During her brief earthly sojourn, Cilento finds time to salvage several other lost sheep, among them such reassuring British character players as Alfie Bass and David Kossoff. The unimportant fantasy was the first film assignment for Diane Cilento, whose career would later briefly be eclipsed by that of her then-husband Sean Connery. It's not likely we would have remembered Cilento at all had she stuck to such disposable fare as The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Felix Aylmer, Diane Cilento, (more)
- 1947
Written and directed by Peter Ustinov, Vice Versa is a one-joke fantasy comedy which manages to hold up almost to the very end. Anthony Newley plays the funloving son of stuffy stockbroker Roger Livesy. Father and son come into possession of a magic stone, and place a wish upon it. The result: Newley inherits Livesy's brain and personality, and vice versa. The best moments involve the suddenly matured Newley's besting of feet-of-clay schoolmaster James Robertson Justice. Not successful enough to spawn a cycle in 1947, Vice Versa is nonetheless an intriguing precursor of the brief spate of identity-switch comedies of the late 1980s--one of which was also titled Vice Versa. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
