Geraldine Chaplin Movies

For the Spanish Mama Turns a Hundred, director Carlos Saura reassembles many of his cast members from his 1972 Anna and the Wolves. As Mama reaches the century mark, her wolf-pack relatives go fang and claw after currying her favor in hopes of a large legacy. The film is set during the Franco regime, permitting Saura to use his greedy family as a microcosm of all that had gone bad in Spain since the Civil War. Though potentially grim, Mama Turns a Hundred is essentially a comedy, though many of the laughs are of the "shock of recognition" variety, especially for those who've come from a similarly avaricious family. The film was originally released as Mama Cumple Cien Anos. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This routine, slightly wooden political and social drama contrasts the difference between the way a widow perceives her husband and how he really was. Geraldine Chaplin is Adelaida, widow of Montiel (Nelson Villagra), who grieves for her dead husband based on her life with him. As circumstances unfold, Adelaida slowly begins to piece together a picture of what her husband was like in the eyes of others. He is clearly hated. Eventually, she discovers that he would capitulate to whatever dictatorship came to power, betraying people who had supported him in the past if they were now on the wrong side of the political divide. Adelaida herself may be a stand-in for the privileged few who see things through their own filtered lenses. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Robert Altman's over-frenetic satire on American marriage rituals and hypocrisy concerns the upper-crust marriage between Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz Jr.) and Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker). As the film begins, a senile bishop forgets the lines to the wedding ceremony and Nettie Sloan (the groom's grandmother) drops dead in an upstairs bedroom. Nettie's death is not disclosed to the two families who converge at the wedding reception. As the two sets of in-laws slam into each other, the bride and groom disappear in the ensuing whirlwind of chaos as both extended families vie for sexual favors and try to keep hidden never-discussed family secrets. Regina Corelli (Nina Van Pallandt) is revealed to be a drug addict, while Luigi, is endeavoring unsuccessfully to keep his Mafia connections under wraps. Meanwhile, the bride's family, although more down to earth, are revealed to be no better. Tulip Brenner (Carol Burnett) begins to flirt with one of the wedding guests, Mackenzie Goddard (Pat McCormick), while Snooks Brenner (Paul Dooley) acts like a lout and drinks heavily. And flying around the edges of the action like Tinkerbell is Buffy Brenner, the Brenners' youngest daughter, who is pregnant by the groom. As other characters bang into each other -- sexual degenerates, hard-nosed radicals, raw-boned emotional wrecks -- the wedding reception heads for its inevitable nuclear explosion. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

This grim, brutal drama chronicles the terrible fate of a childless couple whose only crime was caring. The trouble begins when their barn mysteriously catches fire. Upon their return to the house, they find an adolescent having an epileptic seizure. Without a thought, they take him in, get him to a doctor, and encourage him. They have no clue that it was he who set the fire. Time passes and soon he becomes theirs. Later he sleeps with the wife and gets her pregnant. Just before she has the baby, the teen slaughters her and her husband. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

On the heels of his award-winning Cria cuevos (Raise Ravens), Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura dashed off the muted psychological drama Elisa, My Love. Geraldine Chaplin stars as Elisa, who after an absence of 20 years is reunited with her father, Fernando Rey (in a superb performance, which won him the Cannes Film Festival "Best Actor" prize ). Having just divested herself of an unhappy marriage, Elisa hopes to heal old, long-standing family wounds. Inasmuch as Saura thrives on exploring "unspeakable" subjects in his films, one can gather that the relationship between Elisa and her father may be far more complex than it seems at first. Elisa, Vida Mia was released in English-speaking countries as Elisa, My Love. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

François (Sami Frey), a Jewish lad, works for an insurance company and is engaged to a Jewish girl. His world is very ordered and secure and perhaps feels a bit claustrophobic. When he observes that a murderer has been declared psychologically incompetent and is to be placed in a mental institution, probably for the rest of his life, François feels the murder's plight very keenly. As time goes by, the murderer's situation is more and more unbearable to him, and he breaks off his engagement. Afterward, he has a liaison with a girl he has not known before, an act that somehow frees him. Now he wants to free the murderer somehow. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In 1976, having completed two praiseworthy projects for Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, Geraldine Chaplin journeyed to Spain to appear in Enrique Braso's In Memoriam. Her contribution to the film is secondary to that of Jose Luis Gomez, who play Julio Montero, a man tormented by his past. In pre-war Madrid, Julio, a painfully shy writer, is competing for the love of Paulina (Chaplin), but cannot bring himself to speak. Instead, another witer, a flamboyant hothead, asks for and wins her love. Julio then leaves Madrid for Cambridge. It is not until he returns many year later that he learns to his horror that Paulina's lover murdered her in a fit of jealous rage, after she had come from seeing him off on his journey to Cambridge. The same year that he appeared in In Memoriam, Jose Luis Gomez won the Cannes Festival "best actor" award for his work in Pascal Duarte. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Alan Rudolph's first feature Welcome to L.A. displays his characteristic mood of romantic despair utilizing a La Ronde-like circle of sexual adventures and failed affairs centered around song-writer Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine) which spread out through the city. Barber is an aloof womanizer who cannot commit or love and is used by Rudolph to illustrate the loneliness inherent in big-city life. The film, featuring a haunting score by Richard Baskin, is a bit too ambitious for the beginning director. However, he gets good performances from Sally Kellerman as a lonely real estate agent, Geraldine Chaplin, as a Valley housewife addicted to taxi rides and Lauren Hutton as the mistress of a wealthy man. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

Carlos Saura wrote and directed this powerful psychological drama in which family crises which reflect the embattled soul of a nation are seen through the eyes of an unusually perceptive child. Ana (Ana Torrent) is an eight-year-old girl growing up in a troubled household -- her father Anselmo (Hector Alterio) is a general in the Spanish military during the waning days of Franco's repressive regime, and her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) is dead, Ana having witnessed her agonizing final moments. Anna, her older sister Irene (Conchita Perez) and younger sister Juana (Maite Sanchez) are looked after by their emotionally chilly Aunt Paulina (Monica Randall), while housekeeper Rosa (Florinda Chico) provides what little warmth there is to be found in the household. While Ana's mother is gone, the girl frequently sees and hears her mother's spirit, and is convinced Anselmo's emotional neglect and infidelity is responsible for her death, leading the youngster to take her own form of revenge against her father. The title Cria Cuervos is taken from a Spanish proverb -- "Raise ravens and they'll pluck out your eyes." The film was originally released in the United States under title Cria!, and has been screened in English-speaking territories as Raise Ravens and The Secret of Ana. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This comic interpretation of Alexandre Dumas's classic adventure saga picks up where 1974's The Three Musketeers left off, as D'Artagnan (Michael York), Athos (Oliver Reed), Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), and Porthos (Frank Finlay) scuttle the plans of Lady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) to remove Queen Anne (Geraldine Chaplin) from the seat of power. De Winter is determined to get revenge against the Musketeers, and when she learns that D'Artagnan is infatuated with the lovely Constance (Raquel Welch), she first tries to foil their romance by seducing D'Artagnan herself, and then by persuading Rochefort (Christopher Lee) to kidnap Constance. She then engineers the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), a close friend of D'Artagnan; when word of the Duke's death and Constance's imprisonment reaches D'Artagnan and his comrades, the foursome ride off to rescue the fair lady and see that justice is done against de Winter. The Four Musketeers was filmed concurrently with The Three Musketeers; it was originally intended to be one film, but when director Richard Lester realized the movie would be over three and a half hours long, the decision was made to release it as two separate features instead. This led to lawsuits filed by several of the stars, claiming that they were hired under false pretenses and entitled to be paid for making two films rather than one. The actors won their case, but their settlement was significantly less than the salary they hoped to receive. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This French romance/drama follows the efforts of a woman (Catherine Jourdan) who has long had a stifling marriage in a boring province. She has an affair with a traveling photographer, follows him to Paris, and then has a series of unsatisfactory but interesting relationships, one of which is with a woman. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide