John Horn Movies

They say you can't miss what you never had, but one woman wants to put that idea to the test in this comedy. Kathy Whiting (Harley Jane Kozak) is a housewife and mother of two who enjoys a happy but unexciting relationship with her husband Peter (Bill Pullman), while her best friend Emily Embrey (Elizabeth McGovern) runs an art gallery and is living with a good-looking artist, Elliot Fowler (Brad Pitt). Both women feel that a sense of romantic adventure is missing from their lives, and Kathy has never been able to forget Tom Andrews (Ken Wahl), a football player that she was in love with in high school but never slept with (she was saving herself for marriage at the time). So when Kathy learns that Tom is living in Denver, and Emily will be going there on business soon, she asks Emily for a very big favor: find Tom, seduce him, and then give her a full report on what she's been wondering about these 15 years since graduation. The Favor was filmed in 1991 but went unreleased until 1994, after A River Runs Through It and Legends of the Fall had made fourth-billed Brad Pitt a box-office draw. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The directorial debut of producer Irwin Winkler, Guilty by Suspicion is a sobering account of one movie executive's woes in dealing with the political fallout from the McCarthy Era Hollywood blacklist. Robert De Niro stars as David Merrill, a film director in the 1950s whose obsession with his burgeoning career has estranged him from his wife Ruth (Annette Bening) and their son. When he returns from a trip to Paris, Merrill is surprised when told by his boss, Darryl F. Zanuck (Ben Piazza) that he's been summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is investigating Communist ties to Hollywood. Although Merrill once attended a meeting years before, he's not a Communist, and he refuses to help the committee wreck the career of his friend Bunny Baxter (George Wendt). Merrill becomes blacklisted, unable to find work even in menial positions or under assumed names as the editor of a B-movie or the director of a low-budget Western. Reconciled with his family, Merrill caves in and agrees to testify, but as he prepares to "name names," his conscience plagues him. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Alan Arkin directed and starred in this anarchic comedy. Benny Fikus (Vincent Gardenia) is the owner of a department store that's on its last legs, with his nebbishy son Russell (Rob Reiner) serving as his second-in-command. Benny's bother Ezra (Arkin) used to work with him at the store, but he quit to coach basketball in the midst of a long losing streak. Ezra's wife Marion (Anjanette Comer) desperately wants a child, and Ezra needs a new star player, so he thinks he's helping both of them when he adopts a black teenager (Byron Stewart) who shoots mean hoop. Benny, looking for a way out of the store's irrevocable financial slump, wants to burn the place down for the insurance money, but rather than hire an arsonist, he tries to convince his brother-in-law, Zabbar (Sid Caesar), that the store is actually a Nazi stronghold so Zabbar that will do the deed on his own. The supporting cast also includes Sally K. Marr, whose son was controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Pueblo is a 2-hour videotaped special, originally telecast March 29, 1973 on ABC Theatre. Hal Holbrook stars as commander Lloyd M. Bucher, who in January of 1968 was forced to surrender the USS Pueblo to North Korea. The drama is staged in an impressionistic manner, with dramatized transcripts from Bucher's subsequent Naval Review Board testimony flashing back to isolated moments of terror and torment during the Pueblo crew's 11-month sojourn in a North Korean prison camp. Despite network restrictions of the era, Pueblo is refreshingly frank, right down to the first-ever TV display of a familiar obscene gesture (which the American prisoners explain away to their captors as a "salute"!) Written by Stanley R. Greenberg, Pueblo was later adapted to a stage play, starring Shepperd Strudwick as Bucher. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide