Robert Levin Movies

A Bach Companion is a documentary film profiling the life and art of composer Johann Sebastian Bach. A product of the Baroque period, Bach created music that lives and breathes today in concert halls around the world. The film features several of Bach's masterful compositions recorded live. Scholarly commentary grounds the discussion of Bach's biography in cultural context, detailing the social life of Europe and Germany at the time. ~ Betsy Boyd, Rovi

In this comedy, a woman discovers that it's impossible to get ahead in business without a man to guide her -- so she invents one. Laurel (Whoopi Goldberg) is an expert financial analyst with a top Wall Street brokerage; however, she keeps getting passed over for raises and promotions, and she's convinced that no one at her firm takes her seriously because she's a black woman. Frustrated, Laurel and her loyal assistant Sally (Dianne Wiest) open a new firm, but Laurel discovers that her fears were based firmly in reality: male clients don't want to take financial advice from women, especially women of color. So Laurel invents a white man, Robert S. Cutty, to be the firm's top adviser. Speaking on Cutty's behalf, Laurel passes along the fictional man's advice, which her new clients find to be quite sound, and when they stop by to see him, he always manages to be out of the office (and why wouldn't a man so successful be busy?). The ruse seems to work, and soon Laurel's business is going great guns, but an increasingly large number of her clients want to see Cutty face to face, which won't be easy to pull off. However, with the help of a drag queen, Laurel tries to remake herself into Cutty for a night in order to keep her firm afloat. The Associate was based on a novel by author Jenaro Prieto. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Baretta may have started life as a hastily-assembled, second-echelon rehash of the failed 1973 cop series Toma, but by the time the program entered its second season in the fall of 1975, it had scored a solid hit--and, in the bargain, earned an Emmy award for its star, Robert Blake. Feeling his oats, the maverick Blake began exercising more control over such matters as story selection and casting choices, and also had the last word concerning directorial decisions. In a sense, the series became an extension of the established Blake persona, and the character of Baretta morphed into the star's alter ego. The viewer learned that undercover cop Tony Baretta had grown up in a poor, dysfunctional Italian-American family, and that he had been a street punk who miraculously turned his life around and joined the forces of law and order; similarly, in real life Blake had become a child actor to support his impoverished and fractious family, and upon growing up had endured several years of personal torment thanks to bad business decisions, his volatile temper and an on- and off-drug habit before "reinventing" himself as an actor of stature and respectability. And, like Baretta, Blake angrily bristled when told to merely follow the orders of his superiors, preferring to march to the beat of his own drummer in pursuit of professional excellence. Though the production staff underwent numerous changes of personnel, Baretta's supporting cast remained substatianally the same as in Season One, with Michael D. Roberts, as flamboyant street snitch Rooster, graduating from recurring character to series regular. The one major on-screen change was the replacement of Dana Elcar as Baretta's superior officer Insp. Schiller with Edward Grover as Lt. Hal Brubaker. Comfortably settled in a Wednesday-night timeslot just before the popular ABC crime drama Starsky and Hutch, Baretta finished off the 1975-76 season with a respectable 21.3 rating, ranking 23 out of the top 25 network shows. During its second season, the series also copped another Emmy (rather belatedly) for Harry L. Wolf's cinematography in the first-season episode "Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Adapted by Christopher Knopf from a short story by C.B. Gifford, Joy Ride is a fast-paced pocket variation of the Desperate Hours/Night Holds Terror school of suspense. When middle-aged Mr. Miles (Regis Toomey) picks up a quartet of young-punk hitchhikers, he's only trying to extend the usual courtesies of the road. But the troublemaking foursome (Rad Fulton, Nicholas King, Robert Levin and Jim Bridges) assume that Miles' hospitality is borne of fear, and they decide to take advantage of the situation. The four boys invade Miles' home, trashing the place and causing Mrs. Miles (Ann Doran) to suffer a heart attack. Eventually the law catches up with the four vandals, giving Miles the opportunity for revenge, but he just isn't that sort of guy. One wonders if director Edward Bernds and actress Ann Doran ever shared any on-set anecdotes about their experiences in Columbia's 2-reel comedy unit. Joy Ride as originally released on a double bill with Unwed Mother. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi