Barrie Baldaro Movies

Rip Torn does a magnificent job as American poet Walt Whitman in the fanciful period piece Beautiful Dreamers. The scene is a hellish 19th century Canadian institution for the mentally retarded. Compassionate doctor Maurice Bucke (Colm Feore) defies his superiors by treating his patients as human beings rather than animals. He even begins conducting classes for his charges, teaching them basic cognitive and manual dexterity skills. When Whitman champions Bucke's cause, the doctor is ostracized by those who fear the poet's reputation as a "wild-eyed" radicial. Based on a true story, Beautiful Dreamers is more interesting for its intentions than its execution. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Richard Dreyfuss put himself on the map with his performance in this movie about how ambition and greed can drive someone at the expense of his own happiness. Duddy Kravitz (Dreyfuss) is an 18-year-old Jewish kid from Montreal whose mother is dead, and whose father drives a cab and does a little pimping on the side to pay the bills and send Duddy's older brother to medical school. Duddy has bigger dreams, and he does everything from producing films of bar mitzvahs to attempting to buy real estate to (unknowingly) smuggling heroin in order to strike it rich. Along the way, however, he alienates his girlfriend, drives his grandfather to despair, loses all his friends, and even paralyzes his best employee, while making himself more and more miserable. Duddy's desire to be a success is easy to understand, which makes this potentially unlikable character forgivable, and the film's gallery of details and characters adds realism and energy to the story. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Canadian filmmaker Gerald Potterton utilizes extensive footage from the Soviet adventure film Dr. Abolit in his Tiki Tiki. Abolit boards a rocket with two monkeys and blasts off into space, bent on rescuing a group of monkey kids from extraterrestrial bandits. Framing the live-action storyline are a few animated cartoon sequences involving the efforts of a producer to sell his concept to an apelike movie mogul. This device works as effectively here as it did thirty years earlier in W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. As a payoff, the studio boss is revealed to be King Kong, who sees a lot of potential in a story about heroic simians. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide