Mike Moder Movies

Seen on ABC's Wonderful World of Disney, this $12-million production is the only musical Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for television. The CBS-TV original, with 21-year-old Julie Andrews in the title role and Edie Adams as the Fairy Godmother, played on live television March 31, 1957 to TV's largest audience ever to that date (107-million viewers). That historic production, captured on kinescope, can still be seen today on library monitors at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York and Los Angeles. Hammerstein died in 1960 and did not get to see 18-year-old Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella in the February 22, 1965 restaged production, repeated annually on CBS until 1977 and later made available on videotape from CBS/Fox Video and Facets Multimedia. Added to the 1965 show was "Loneliness of Evening", a song actually written for South Pacific but cut before the Broadway opening.

Running a half-hour longer, this third interpretation premiered November 2, 1997. Filmed over a 28-day period, it stars Brandy Norwood as Cinderella and Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother, with Bernadette Peters as the Stepmother, Whoopi Goldberg as the Queen (wearing $60 million worth of borrowed Harry Winston jewelry), Paolo Montalban as the Prince, and Jason Alexander as the Prince's steward, Lionel. Scripter Robert L. Freedman provided a rewrite of the original Oscar Hammerstein book, and three other Richard Rodgers songs were added to the existing score: "There's Music in You" (from the 1953 movie musical Main Street to Broadway), "The Sweetest Sounds" (a Brandy/Montalban duet), and "Falling in Love with Love". Originally set in motion as a follow-up to the highly successful TV Gypsy (1993) with Bette Midler, this 1997 multicultural version (sometimes referred to as the "rainbow Cinderella") was years in the making, since it was initiated in 1994 when Houston joined executive producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (the team responsible for the TV Gypsy). ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

In this made-for-TV movie, Lisa Hartman plays a woman who was given a hysterectomy she is not convinced was necessary. She files a $7 million lawsuit against the surgeon, who has problems of his own to deal with -- namely a contentious divorce from his wife, who also happens to be partners with him in the medical clinic where the surgery was performed. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In Fleshburn Calvin Duggai (Sonny Landham) is a Native American who can't put his wartime experiences behind him. His main beef is against the team of psychiatrists who shipped him off to an institution. After making his escape, Duggai kidnaps the four doctors and maroons them in the middle of the desert. Now, he reasons, they can experience the hell he's been through, both as a soldier and as an American Indian. Of the four abductees, Sam MacKenzie (Steve Kanaly) stands the best chance for survival--and that chance is none too good. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Set upon a romantic Greek island, this drama chronicles the experiences of a pair of young American adults who go there for summer vacation. Their idyll is interrupted by a sexy archaeologist who has come there to work on a dig. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Then professional potheads Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong teamed up for Cheech & Chong: Up In Smoke, which features the drug-addled duo on a road trip throughout California; that is to say, a road-trip they hope will culminate in finding some quality weed. Instead, a series of mishaps result in their respective deportations to Mexico. Desperate to get back to the states so they can perform in their band's gig later that night, Cheech and Chong unwittingly agree to drive a very unique car across the border -- rather than steel and various metal bits, the vehicle is constructed entirely out of marijuana. Back in the States and accompanied by two extraordinarily out-of-it female hitchhikers, the stoned group meanders about in an attempt to get their musical performance together, and narrowly escapes from local law enforcement agencies on numerous occasions despite their complete inability to realize they were being tailed to begin with. The incredibly low-budget movie surprised critics, grossed millions, spawned a series of lesser follow-up films, and cemented Cheech & Chong's cult-status among potheads across the globe. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

In this sentimental comedy, the coach of the struggling Phoenix Suns basketball team finds his already heavy load increased when his wife decides to adopt three more children, a Vietnamese, a black and a Native American. They already have three kids of their own. Now in addition to trying to produce a winning team, he must figure out how to feed three more, and deal with bigoted neighbors. Things get even worse when he is fired. Fortunately, his trials are only temporary. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Petty jealousies and misunderstandings between two rival families escalate into a tragic outburst of violence in this drama. Laban Feather (Rod Steiger) is the patriarch of a family of Tennessee moonshiners, brewing corn liquor with the help of his sons: Thrush (Scott Wilson), Zack (Jeff Bridges), Hawk (Ed Lauter), and Finch (Randy Quaid). The chief rivals of the Feather Family have long been the Gutshalls, another Tennessee clan who sell illegal alcohol; the Gutshalls are led by father Pap (Robert Ryan), with the help of his boys Ludie (Kiel Martin), Seb (Gary Busey), and Villum (Paul Koslo). While fighting for their share of the market in white lightning, the Feathers and the Gutshalls have also feuded over a piece of land that each side believes is rightfully theirs. Hoping to create internal friction amongst the Feather siblings, Ludie Gutshall mails a postcard from the non-existent "Lolly-Madonna" to the Feather home and allows the brothers to puzzle over who has attracted her attentions. The prank begins to turn ugly when Thrush and Hawk kidnap Roonie Gill (Season Hubley), a woman passing through town en route to meet her fiancée, believing that she's the "Lolly Madonna" they've heard about. Lolly-Madonna XXX was based on a novel by Sue Grafton entitled The Lolly-Madonna War, and was also released under that title. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Years before Kevin Costner danced with wolves, Robert Redford headed to the mountains to escape civilization in Sydney Pollack's wilderness western. Around 1850, ex-soldier Johnson (Redford) decides that he would rather live alone as a mountain man in Colorado than deal with society's constraints. After a series of setbacks, he meets grizzled mountain veteran Bear Claws (Will Geer), who teaches him how to survive. Jeremiah strives to live as peaceably as possible in the rugged environment, trading with the native Crow tribe, adopting a boy (Josh Albee) after his family is massacred, and even marrying the daughter (Delle Bolton) of a Flathead chief in order to avoid confrontation. He settles into a mountain home with his family, but the U.S. cavalry, complete with a puritanical Reverend, interrupt the idyll to compel Jeremiah to lead them over the mountains and through a Crow burial ground to rescue white settlers. After the Crow kill his family in retaliation, Jeremiah's frenzied moment of payback precipitates a long-running vendetta, turning him into a legendary Indian killer at the expense of his original ideals, on the way to a final moment of grace. Spectacularly shot on location in Utah, the film captures both the appeal and the challenge of the landscape that Jeremiah chooses over civilization. With an unglamorous performance by Redford and a story that questioned white colonialism while mythologizing the man of nature, Jeremiah Johnson appealed to its 1972 audience and became one of the biggest hits of the year. Wavering between heroicizing Jeremiah for surviving and damning him for killing, Jeremiah Johnson took its place among the Vietnam-era cycle of critical westerns, like Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), that condemned civilization for corrupting the wilderness and preventing individuals from going pacifistically native. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Recounting how the West was won through the eyes of a white man raised as a Native American, Arthur Penn's 1970 adaptation of Thomas Berger's satirical novel was a comic yet stinging allegory about the bloody results of American imperialism. As a misguided 20th-century historian listens, 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) narrates the story of being the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand. White orphan Crabb was adopted by the Cheyenne, renamed "Little Big Man," and raised in the ways of the "Human Beings" by paternal mentor Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), accepting non-conformity and living peacefully with nature. Violently thrust into the white world, Jack meets a righteous preacher (Thayer David) and his wife (Faye Dunaway), tries to be a gunfighter under the tutelage of Wild Bill Hickock (Jeff Corey), and gets married. Returned to the Cheyenne by chance, Jack prefers life as a Human Being. The carnage wreaked by the white man in the Washita massacre and the lethal fallout from the egomania of General George A. Custer (Richard Mulligan) at Little Big Horn, however, show Crabb the horrific implications of Old Lodge Skins' sage observation, "There is an endless supply of White Men, but there has always been a limited number of Human Beings." ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide