Linda Manz Movies
Lead actress, onscreen from the late '70s. ~ All Movie Guide
In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna's "Like a Prayer," fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm's-eye view of white-trash suffering. The main characters include Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who sells cat carcasses to a middleman who procures them for use at a local Chinese restaurant; his mother (Linda Manz), who teaches him to tap dance while reminiscing about her dead husband; Tummler (Nick Sutton), a mullet-haired local sex symbol; a midget (Bryant L. Crenshaw); a pair of boy-crazy, bleach-blond sisters named Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Bara); a slut with a lump in her breast (Lara Tosh); a group of drunken louts; and Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who wanders the town enigmatically in a pair of long pink ears. In between scenes of these characters enacting their bizarre routines, Korine intersperses impressionistic and quasi-documentary scenes with voice-over narration that ranges from incest memoirs to arty dialogue along the lines of "He's got what it takes to be a legend: He's got a marvelous persona." Shot just outside Nashville, TN, Gummo includes costume designs by Korine's then-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, who also plays Dot and who previously starred in the Korine-scipted, Larry Clark-directed Kids. Jacob Reynolds would go on to appear in Getting to Know You, though few of the director's other discoveries have appeared on film since. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, (more)
- 1983
This version of Hans Christian Andersen's story was produced for Faerie Tale Theatre. It is the story of a young maiden who bravely faces the fearsome ice-hearted Snow Queen in order to free her beloved. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1983
In a curiously undefined story about a macho-man who roughs up his very attractive but submissive wife and feisty teenage daughter just because he cannot relate to them in any other way, director Gustav Emck has created interesting characters with no apparent motivation for their behavior. In the end, the situation deteriorates so much that the daughter convinces her mother they had better get out for their own good health, and the two escape into an uncertain future. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Linda Manz, Walt Davis, (more)
Out of the Blue captures the turbulence of youth culture of the early '80s by presenting a three-person nuclear family that is about to implode. In a prologue, Don Barnes (Dennis Hopper), a school bus driver, is drunkenly distracted one day behind the wheel, resulting in a horrible accident. He comes home from a stint in prison to find his wife, Kathy (Sharon Farrell), hooked on drugs and his now-teenaged daughter, Cindy (Linda Manz), sullen and remote. Don's old buddies are a fun-loving bunch who work only to afford to get high and party, and he seems to be falling back into his old ways instead of getting straight and pulling his family out of their funk. The story focuses on Cindy's alienation from both her parents and most of her classmates. She's influenced by the energy and anger of punk music and considers her parents pathetic relics of the '60s counterculture. Hopper reportedly took over direction of the film after co-producer/co-writer Leonard Yakir departed the production. It was Hopper's first job behind the camera since The Last Movie, his legendary flop follow-up to Easy Rider. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Linda Manz, Sharon Farrell, (more)
- 1980
In this drama, fifteen year old girl from a dysfunctional home gets herself in all kinds of trouble when she begins acting rebelliously. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
The year 1979 saw an epidemic of American street-gang films, including Phil Kaufman's hit period drama The Wanderers. Set in the Bronx in 1963, the film concerns the titular gang of Italian-American teens and their ongoing power struggle with the rival "Fordham Baldies." Richard Price, upon whose novel this film was based, drew from his own experiences to weave his tale. Essentially a series of anecdotes-some tension-filled, some amusing -- The Wanderers climaxes on the occasion of the J.F.K. assassination, which for Price and hundreds and thousands of his aimless contemporaries served as a wake-up call. Viewed from the vantage point of the 1990s, one would wish that the current street gangs be shocked into adulthood with such suddenness (though not through the same tragic means). Ken Wahl, Karen Allen, and Linda Manz are among the standout performers in this richly detailed period piece. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ken Wahl, John Friedrich, (more)
- 1979
In the second half of the 19th century, some 100,000 abandoned or poverty-stricken New York children were relocated to midwestern families by the Children's Aid Society. Made for television, Orphan Train is a fictionalized account of the early days of the Society in 1854. Top billing goes to Jill Eikenberry as a minister's daughter and Kevin Dobson as a photojournalist. Eikenberry shepherds the first group of orphans from New York to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, with Dobson along for the ride in hopes of getting the exclusive story. En route, the orphans encounter hostility from so-called "respectable" people and danger from a fire and a train crash. The supporting cast includes Glenn Close, five years away from her theatrical-movie debut in The World According to Garp. Based on a novel by Dorothea G. Petrie, Orphan Train was initially telecast December 22, 1979. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jill Eikenberry, Kevin Dobson, (more)
Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, the long-awaited follow-up to his 1973 debut Badlands, confirmed his reputation as a visual poet and narrative iconoclast with a story of love and murder told through the jaded voice of a child and expressive images of nature. In 1916, Chicago steelworker Bill (Richard Gere, stepping in for John Travolta) flees to Texas with his little sister Linda (Linda Manz) and girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) after fatally erupting at his boss. Along with other itinerant laborers, they work the harvest at a wealthy, ailing farmer's ranch, but the farmer (playwright Sam Shepard) falls in love with Abby, and, believing her to be Bill's sister, asks the three to stay on at his elysian spread. Seeing it as his one real chance to escape perpetual poverty, Bill urges Abby to marry the sick man. Marriage, however, has more restorative powers, and the farmer has more magnetism, than Bill had planned. "Nobody's perfect," Linda impassively observes in one of her many voiceovers, after their brief paradise is erased by plagues of locusts, fire, and lethal jealousy. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, (more)
Not surprisingly, this fascinating dissection of Gypsy life in America was vilified by several ethnic special-interest groups, who'd previously delivered their mimeoed missives to novelist Peter Maas, on whose book the film was based. Sterling Hayden is the "king" of a New York-based gypsy tribe, who on his deathbed passes his crown to his reluctant grandson, Eric Roberts. Roberts' scuzzy father Judd Hirsch, envious that he's been passed over, begins plotting the demise of his own son. It appears at first that the boy, a thoroughly assimilated Manhattanite, would be more than willing to give up his invisible throne to Hirsch, but there's something about his heritage that always draws him back to his own people. Several genuine gypsies took part in the film as extras, bit players and technical advisers; reportedly, they also spent much of the shooting time trying to cadge a few dishonest dollars from cast and crew. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sterling Hayden, Shelley Winters, (more)
