Martin Balsam Movies
Bronx-raised actor Martin Balsam was the oldest of three children of a ladies' sportswear salesman. "Actors are bums" was dad's reaction when Balsam announced his intention of going into show business; still, young Martin took full advantage of lunch breaks from his "real" jobs to rehearse for amateur theatricals. After World War II, Balsam joined New York's Actors Studio, supporting himself by waiting on tables and ushering at Radio City Music Hall. During his formative years he was briefly married to actress Joyce Van Patten; their daughter Talia Balsam would later become a successful film and TV performer. Working steadily if not profitably in nightclubs and TV, Balsam made his first film, the Actors Studio-dominated On the Waterfront, in 1954. Averaging a movie and/or a play a year starting in 1957 (among his best-known film roles were Juror #1 in Twelve Angry Men [1957] and the unfortunate detective Arbogast in Psycho [1960]), Balsam went on to win a Tony for the Broadway play I Know You Can't Hear Me When the Water's Running, an Obie for the off-Broadway production Cold Storage, and an Academy Award for his performance as Jason Robards' older brother in the 1965 film version of A Thousand Clowns. Unfortunately for Balsam, the Oscar was as much a curse as a blessing on his career, and soon he was playing little more than variations on his Thousand Clowns role. In 1979, he was engaged by Norman Lear to play "lovable bigot" Archie Bunker's acerbic Jewish business partner Murray Klein on the CBS sitcom Archie Bunker's Place; he remained with the series until 1981. In 1991, Balsam appeared in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, the remake of a film in which Balsam had co-starred (in an entirely different role) in 1962. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1994
- R
In the tradition of Mel Brooks, this Italian comedy offers an episodic parody of classic thrillers and horror movies. Film includes cameos from several stars including Mel Brooks, John Astin, Larry Storch, Phyllis Diller, John Carpenter, and John Landis. The story begins as director Ezio Greggio is being stabbed ala Psycho in his shower. Before he dies he recaps the events leading to his death. The scene was L.A. and FBI rookie Jo Dee Fostar has been assigned to interview psycho inmate Dr. Animal Cannibal Pizza. Meanwhile Fostar's girlfriend swipes $400,000 bucks from her boss and ends up hiding in the Cemetery Hotel, run by Antonio Motel. Inspector Balsam investigates cases of dead hotel victims. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dom DeLuise, Ezio Greggio, (more)
- 1992
In this two-part adventure drama based on a thriller by author Sidney Sheldon, three nuns must run for their lives from a cruel colonel. Their flight leads them straight to a renowned Spanish rebel. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Deborah Raffin, Michael Nouri, (more)
Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear provided the director with a box-office success to follow up the critical success of the previous year's Goodfellas. After serving a lengthy prison sentence for a sexual assault, Max Cady (Robert De Niro) comes calling on the man who served as his public defender, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte). Max begins a campaign of harassment against the man and his family because Bowden buried a report that would have in all likelihood acquitted Cady of the charges against him. Bowden's shaky ethics continue in his personal life as he is considering beginning an extramarital affair with colleague Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas), since he and his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange) have had a difficult time coming back together since he has admitted to previous indiscretions. Cady infiltrates the family most insidiously by cultivating a relationship with the Bowden's troubled teenage daughte, Danielle (Juliette Lewis), who is all the more susceptible to Cady's advances because of her parents' problems. Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, the stars of the original film, have cameo appearances in this version of Cape Fear. De Niro and Lewis were both nominated for Academy Awards for their work in the film. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, (more)
Two well-known directors each adapt stories by Edgar Allen Poe in this horror drama. George Romero's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" tells how the wife of an elderly, wealthy man and her lover--who also happens to be the husband's private physician--scheme to control his assets. Dying before they can carry out their plans, his soul is caught between life and death while they freeze the body to finish their work. In the Dario Argento-directed "The Black Cat" a crime photographer, known for his photos' gruesome content, kills his girlfriend's titular pet and then his girlfriend. Soon he gets a good look at what he's done. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Adrienne Barbeau, E.G. Marshall, (more)
- 1988
In this thriller, a successful executive risks it all to help a street orphan get disentangled from the world of drugs. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alfre Woodard, Mario Van Peebles, (more)
- 1987
The two-part TV movie Queenie was adapted from the roman a clef by Michael Korda. This is the story of Queenie Kelly,an English girl (Mia Sara) from the slums of Calcutta who is kept from full knowledge of her Indian heritage by her protective mother (Jean Simmons). As a means of bettering herself, Queenie moves to London, where she works as an exotic dancer. Later on, Queenie, using an assumed name, becomes a famous movie star and marries a powerful producer. At the point, we should observe that "Queenie" was the nickname of Michael Korda's aunt: actress Merle Oberon, who was married to British film mogul Alexander Korda. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely...well, you know. And any resemblance between awkward newcomer Mia Sara and the ultra-sophisticated Merle Oberon is...well, accidental. Queenie originally aired May 10 and 11, 1987. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mia Sara, Kirk Douglas, (more)
- 1987
- R
When newspaper editor Charles Bradley (Anthony Zerbe) makes a call uncovering corrupt Los Angeles cops selling drugs, his phone is tapped and his architect son Joey (Clayton Rohner) is endangered. A detective is killed in Joey's apartment and detective Ryan (Ray Sharkey) is assigned to protect him. Ryan is in league with the crooked cops and tries to kill Joey. Joey escapes but is hit by a car driven by Jenny Fox (Talia Balsam). She takes him back to her place where Joey is nursed back to heath and the seeds of love are planted. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- 1987
Kids Like These was cowritten by Emily Perl Kingsley, the mother of a Down's Syndrome child. Basing the script for this TV movie on her own experiences, Ms. Kingsley relates the story of Tyne Daly and Richard Crenna, the parents of a Down's baby. Refusing to accept the doctor's grim prognosis and suggestion that the child be institutionalized, Daly devotes herself to training her baby to surmount his handicaps. By the time the boy enters school, he is functioning at a higher level than anticipated, inspiring Daly to begin working with other parents of handicapped children. But her tireless activities on behalf of strangers takes a toll on her own family--and also blinds her to the still-existing limitations facing her son. Directed by Tyne Daly's then-husband Georg Stanford Brown, Kids Like These utilizes five Down's children to portray the son at various ages; the cast also includes real-life therapist Dr. Margaret Gianini. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1986
In this uneven drama, Jeff (Tom Mason) is a Vietnam vet trying to eke out a living in New York when his already difficult life gets worse. In order to keep his head above water, he takes on several different, low-paying jobs in addition to driving a cab. He really wants to sell his cartoons so he can have a chance at syndication, and at the same time he satisfies his artist's calling by painting scenes of the war. But then the rent on his father's diner is raised through the roof, so it looks like his dad will be out of business soon. The rejections of his cartoons continue, and even his ex-girlfriend is having her separate problems. Without a doubt, Jeff decides it is time to retrench. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Chris Weatherhead
- 1986
Season Three of Murder She Wrote begins with the first episode of a two-part story, in which mystery writer Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) pays a visit to the Carmody Circus, an extremely small-time operation. It seems that Jessica has evidence that one of the circus' employees, a roustabout-clown who calls himself Carl, is actually her brother-in-law Neil (Jackie Cooper), who has long been presumed dead. No sooner does Jessica link up with Neil than the man is accused of murdering the circus' hateful manager Hank Sutter (Charles Napier). A young Courtney Cox appears as Neil's granddaughter, Carol Bannister. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1986
In the second half of Murder She Wrote's two-part Season Three opener, Jessica's long-missing brother in law Neil Fletcher (Jackie Cooper), who has been working under an alias with the Carmody Circus, has confessed to the murder of circus manager Hank Sutter. Jessica (Angela Lansbury) is convinced that Neil is innocent, and that he is covering up for somebody else--and this proves to be a reasonable conclusion when a second murder occurs, in which the victim is rival circus owner Harry Kingman (Joe Dorsey). Seriously hampering Jessica's investigation is the stone wall of resistance built up by the highly clannish circus folk--and by the curiously hostile local authorities. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Menahem Golan melds a Chuck Norris action spectacle with the disaster film genre in The Delta Force. The story is based upon the June, 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet, where passengers were held at gun-point by terrorists in Beirut, Lebanon. The film re-enacts various real life incidents from the crisis -- an American serviceman is beaten to death, a terrorist holds a gun to the pilot's head as the pilot is being questioned by reporters -- while depicting the tension aboard the plane and the agony of the passengers, held under the threat of death by the terrorists. The Delta Force, a crack anti-terrorist commando group, is preparing to rescue the passengers. Colonel Nick Alexander (Lee Marvin) is the grizzled commander of the task force; his best soldier is Major Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), who was planning to retire but is called back into action for one last heroic stand against terrorism. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Chuck Norris, Lee Marvin, (more)
- 1986
In this charming drama, a aging rock musician and a world-weary flight attendant haven't seen each other in years. Then they learn that their parents are planning to marry--each other. Romance ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1986
Adapted from the play by Jules Feiffer, Grown Ups was produced for cable television. A pre-talkshow Charles Grodin plays the Feifferesque central character, a writer facing a mid-life crisis. He turns to his family for support, but, to put it mildly, they're no help at all. Feiffer is a writer of monologues rather than plays, and the verbose nature of this taped drama bears this out: characters talk at each other incessantly, but never to each other. Still, Grodin and his co-stars Jean Stapleton, Martin Balsam and Marilu Henner hold up quite well under the circumstances. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1986
Second Serve is that rare TV movie which refuses to sensationalize its so-called "sensational" material. This is the true story of Richard Raskind (here named Richard Radley): Yale grad, Naval officer, brilliant surgeon and tennis champ. What Richard has successfully hidden from practically everyone is the fact that he feels like a woman trapped in a man's body. In 1975, he goes so far as to endure a sex-change operation, emerging as Renee Richards. The film is not so much about this "alteration" as its ramifications, particularly the fierce opposition from the US Tennis Association when Renee wants to qualify as a female pro player. Rather than cast two actors to play the "before and after" protagonist, Vanessa Redgrave plays both Richard and Renee. While it's no great shock to see Ms. Redgrave with short hair, her performance as a man in Second Serve is the sort of work for which the phrase "tour de force" was coined. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Michael Winner ups the ante once again in Death Wish 3. Any pretense of Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) having a career in architecture is completely gone. Kersey's new career appears to be as a professional vigilante, blowing away muggers, rapists and thieves off the mean streets -- or as he terms it "thinning the herd." Back in New York City, Kersey, with his usual luck, arrives just in time to find an old friend dying after a vicious beating by a multi-cultural gang of thugs. The cops arrest Kersey, but it just so happens that police chief Richard S. Shriker (Ed Lauter) is like Kersey with a badge: "I'm the law, and that means I get to violate your civil rights." He makes a deal with Kersey: he can go free as long as he keeps the cops informed of his death counts. Kersey grunts in agreement and proceeds to move into a decaying tenement building in the middle of a bombed out gang war zone. The building is populated by a group of elderly tenants who are terrified by the neighborhood gang warfare. Kersey declares his own personal war on the neighborhood gang, led by a frenzied leader named Fraker (Gavan O'Herilhy), who wears a reverse Mohawk hair-style. As Kersey devises booby traps and trip-wire bombs to confound the gang, the senior citizens gleefully take pot shots at the wounded gang members from their windows. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Charles Bronson, Deborah Raffin, (more)
Post-collegiate angst, '80s style, is the subject of this coming-of-age ensemble piece, which traces the fortunes of a group of Georgetown grads as they enter the real world and grapple with work, infidelity, and adulthood. The most outwardly upscale member of the gang, Jules (Demi Moore), hides a plethora of emotional baggage behind a chic wardrobe, an expensive apartment, a fashionable drug habit, and lots of meaningless casual sex. Her friend Wendy (Mare Winningham) has the opposite problem; a trust-fund baby with body-image issues and little sexual experience, she's hung up on Billy (Rob Lowe), a no-good, sax-playing drunkard who can't face up to his responsibilities in the job market or at home with his wife and young child. Such open infidelity is anathema to Alex (Judd Nelson), who must maintain a sense of propriety even while engaging in compulsive womanizing; after all, the Democrat-turned-Republican's nascent political career requires the sort of picture-perfect relationship he shares with girlfriend Leslie (Ally Sheedy). That doesn't sit too well with tortured writer Kevin (Andrew McCarthy), who toils away at a newspaper job and pines away for the unattainable Leslie. Unrequited love also dogs Kirby (Emilio Estevez), a law-school student whose greatest wish is to romance classy doctor Dale Biberman (Andie MacDowell), who is, alas, way out of his league. Co-written by director Joel Schumacher and his studio intern, Carl Kurlander, St. Elmo's Fire spawned the number one pop hit "St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion)," which was credited to John Parr but co-written by music producer David Foster. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, (more)
- 1985
A crew of international astronauts find that a murderer is in their ranks. They must solve the crime before reaching earth, and fortunately receive help from the base commander (Wilford Brimley). The film was originally made for television. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
- 1984
Little Gloria...Happy at Last is the two-part TV adaptation of Barbara Goldsmith's 1980 best-seller. The film concerns the true-life custody battle over the daughter of millionaire Reggie Vanderbilt (Christopher Plummer) and his "child bride," Gloria Morgan (Lucy Gutteridge). When the over-imbibing Reggie dies, Gloria enjoys the high life as a wealthy widow, leaving her daughter in the care of her sister-in-law, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (chillingly portrayed by Angela Lansbury in her TV-movie debut). Gloria's personal income, predicated on the child's inheritance, is severely cut, whereupon Gloria sues the indomitable Vanderbilts for custody of her daughter. We won't tell you the outcome, but we can tell you that "Little Gloria," the ten-year-old focus of the custody fight, grew up to be the same Gloria Vanderbilt who went into the designer jeans business. Little Gloria...Happy at Last was originally telecast October 24 and 25, 1982. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1984
In this run-of-the-mill suspense thriller, a woman fights for her survival on two different occasions. Kathy's (P.J. Soles) husband Joe (Kit Taylor) at first seems normal -- until Kathy catches him slashing a prostitute in the shower. She calls the police and Joe is institutionalized though not restrained enough -- he escapes and comes after Kathy. Terrified even after the sheriff dashes in and captures Joe, Kathy takes off for Australia to stay with her friend Gwen (Susan Stenmark) where new problems lie in wait. Gwen's landlord is deranged and spies on his tenants through hidden video cameras, a bad omen for Kathy's future safety. Although it is slow-paced and unimaginative, there is still enough suspense and action in this film to keep most viewers bracing themselves for whatever comes next. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- P.J. Soles, Kit Taylor, (more)
- 1983
- PG
Playwright Herb Gardner's patented combination of cynicism and sentimentality that worked so well in his A Thousand Clowns didn't quite jell in his subsequent The Goodbye People. This film version, adapted and directed by Gardner, stars Martin Balsam, who'd won an Oscar for his work in the 1966 cinemazation of Thousand Clowns. Based on Gardner's own childhood memories, the film casts Balsam as fiftysomething Max Silverman, who gets a new lease on life after surviving heart surgery. Ignoring the pleas of friends and family, Max decides to fulfill a life-long ambition by opening up a combination hot dog and tropical drink stand on a remote public beach. The only person other than Max to have faith in this benighted project is Arthur Korman (Judd Hirsch), who like Max has spent most of his life in a dead-end job. Somehow, Max and Arthur's unquenchable optimism draws a few other misfits into their plans. Striving hard for whimsy, The Goodbye People seems more like a 104-minute visit to a home for aging high-school geeks (not that there's anything wrong with that!) ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Judd Hirsch, Martin Balsam, (more)
- 1983
This drama is adapted from the true story of Barbara Graham, a woman sentenced to die in the mid-1950s after she allegedly committed a murder during a robbery. Graham pleaded innocent until the day she died in the San Quentin gas chamber. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1982
Chaim Sigerski (Martin Balsam), an Auschwitz survivor who runs a Holocaust museum, is convinced that his old friend Isaac (Than Wyenn) did not die in a traffic accident, but was instead deliberately murdered by a fugitive Nazi war criminal. Finding the authorities indifferent to his suspicions, Chaim turns to medical examiner Quincy (Jack Klugman) for help. As a result, Quincy ends up butting heads with Cornelius Sumner (Norman Lloyd), a wealthy and influential activist who denies that the Holocaust ever happened. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1981
This pilot film for an unsold TV series was originally titled They're Playing Our Tape. Michael Constantine stars as Frank Yost, the avuncular head of a videotape dating services called "Good Possibilities." Among Yost's clients is recently divorced executive David Franklin (Martin Balsam), single mom Samantha Young (Barbara Welles), athletic coach and "health nut" Peter Barnes (Larry Breeding), swinging single Carol Clark (Jan Smithers), traditionalist mechanic Richardson (Larry Wilcox), and workaholic businesswoman Barbara Welles (Mariette Hartley). The Love Tapes rolled into view courtesy of ABC on May 9, 1980. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
