Robert Goodier Movies
- 1981
- PG
Donald Sutherland plays a brilliant surgeon who becomes a media celebrity after performing an artificial-heart transplant. Jeff Goldblum, inventor of the ersatz heart, likewise basks in the glow of sudden fame. The only person to have reservations about the procedure is heart recipient Mare Winningham, who becomes depressed over the knowledge that she's not altogether human. Several ethical questions are raised and left unresolved; the film assumes that the audience is intelligent and perceptive enough to draw its own conclusions. Released in Canada in 1981, Threshold was not offered an American distribution until after the Barney Clark heart transplant of 1983. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Donald Sutherland, John Marley, (more)
- 1979
- PG
Adam (George Segal) is an English instructor at a U.S. college who hopes to win a professorship and tenure. Tricia (Glenda Jackson) is an English divorcee. They both wind up on a French ski slope at exactly the wrong time, and in the resulting collision, break one another's legs. While they are slinging ever-wittier insults at each other, they are also falling in love. They soon wed, with Tricia joining Adam back in the States. There, it becomes clear that Tricia was not cut out to be a dutiful, meek professor's wife. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- George Segal, Glenda Jackson, (more)
- 1974
- PG
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
- Starring:
- Richard Dreyfuss, Micheline Lanctôt, (more)
- 1971
- R
John Herbert's stage play Fortune and Men's Eyes first enjoyed a sensational run on Broadway with Sal Minneo in the lead and was originally a fairly tame drama which used prison homosexual activity as a framework around which to base a plea for prison reform. In this screen adaptation, Mineo's role as Smitty, the unfortunate naif sent to prison on a drug charge who becomes a brutal prison leader, is played by Wendell Burton. Basically, this is an earnest prison drama with some small amusement provided by its treatment of prison homosexuality. Michael Greer offers a noteworthy performance as the extremely flamboyant and effeminate "Queenie." While this film has strong language and some nudity, sexual situations are handled discreetly enough for the film to have merited an "R" rating at the time of its release. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1970
The man with the "life wish" is multi-billionaire Burl Ives, who maintains an isolated medical research center. Stuart Whitman is hired as the new head of this center, where he is told to ignore any unusual goings-on and to keep his mouth shut. Slowly it dawns on Whitman that there's an inordinate number of wealthy old men entering the center--and the research lab is busy dissecting younger cadavers. Without revealing any more of the plot, we can point out that the film's closing line refers to Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung, who was 80 years old at the time. The original title of Man Who Wanted to Live Forever was The Heart Farm, which would have given the game away from the outset. This TV movie was released theatrically in Europe as The Only Way Out is Dead, which likewise lowered the film's element of surprise. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Oedipus Rex looks just like what it was: a photographed stage play. Any cinematic deficiencies are, however, quickly forgotten as the "magic" of the Sophocles tragedy (translated by William Butler Yeats) takes hold. Staged by Sir Tyrone Guthrie at the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare festival, the film spotlights such formidable Canadian-based talents as Douglas Campbell (Oedipus Rex) and Douglas Rain (Messenger). The story, of course, concerns Oedipus' detective work in locating the murderer of his father, and his nonplused (to say the least) reaction when he discovers that, not only is hehimself the guilty party, but his wife Jocasta is actually his own mother. When Douglas Rain comes on screen, see if you can pin down his voice. That's right: Rain was the dispassionate voice of homicidal computer Hal 9000 in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (Douglas Campbell was later in the McKenzie Brothers' slapstick comedy Strange Brew, but that's hardly in the same category as 2001). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Douglas Rain, Douglas Campbell, (more)
Versatile character actor Harry Townes is afforded a rare top-billed assignment in Operation Manhunt. Townes is cast as the real-life Igor Gouzenko, who while working as a code clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa was instrumental in smashing a Red spy ring operating in Canada. The film recounts Gouzenko's disillusionment with the Communist party line, his decision to cooperate with federal officials, and the efforts by the KGB to put him out of the way permanently. Operation Manhunt was produced by Matty Fox, the head of Motion Pictures for Television, and was originally intended for a simultaneous theatrical and TV release. The story of Igor Gouzenko was previously dramatized on a bigger-budgeted scale in 20th Century-Fox's The Iron Curtain. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Harry Townes, Irja Jensen, (more)
- 1946
Virtually plotless, the British Meet the Navy is not so much a film as a musical revue. Which is as it should be, since the film is based on the Royal Canadian Navy stage show of the same name, originally put together by radio musical arranger Louis Silvers and choreographer Larry Ceballos. Like its Hollywood predecessor This is the Army, Meet the Navy is so smooth and professional-looking that one doubts the publicity claims that the cast was comprised entirely of talented amateurs. Few of the cast members went on to illustrious careers, though most were certainly capable of doing so. The film closes with a Technicolor sequence, wherein the Meet the Navy cast participate in a Command Performance before the Royal Family-including young princess Elizabeth. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lionel Murton, Margaret Hurst, (more)
