Elizabeth McGovern Movies

E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime was a sprawling fictional account of American manners and mores in the years between 1900 and 1913. Among the mosaic of colorful factual and fictional characters in the novel were escape artist Harry Houdini and radical Emma Goldman. Both characters are all but eliminated in the film version, which only concentrates on three of Doctorow's many plot threads: The story of an immigrant artist (Mandy Patinkin) who becomes a movie director; the saga of "Gibson Girl" Evelyn Nesbit Shaw (Elizabeth McGovern), for whose sake playboy Harry K. Thaw (Robert Joy); kills architect Stanford White (Norman Mailer) and a lone black man's (Howard Rollins Jr.) quest for justice when his car is destroyed by a racist fire chief (Kenneth McMillan). This last subplot consumes most of the film's running time, to the overall detriment of the pacing. There are also several scenes involving an unnamed upper-middle-class family (headed by James Olson and Mary Steenburgen) who are evidently meant to be the audience's eyes and ears, but are frankly not terribly interesting. Back in 1981, Ragtime was given plenty of press coverage as the "comeback" picture for James Cagney, after twenty years in retirement. The problem is that Cagney's character (a police commissioner) isn't in the book, and his inclusion not only throws the story off balance, but necessitates the removal of several potentially interesting characters and events. Another detriment is the gratuitous (and illogical) nudity in the Evelyn Nesbit scenes, which earned the film its "R" rating. An ornate misfire, Ragtime is of interest today only for its remarkable cast of veterans and stars-to-be, including Pat O'Brien and Eloise O'Brien, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Allen, Moses Gunn, Jeff Daniels and Fran Drescher. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Saul (Dudley Moore), a married psychiatrist, becomes romantically obsessed with Chloe (Elizabeth McGovern), one of his patients. Chloe has already devastated one psychoanalyst, and although the venerable Freud himself (Alec Guinness) appears to counsel Saul in his worst moments, the man continues on his tormented way. In spite of notable names in the acting field, neither the subsidiary characters nor the story itself rise above the limited dialogue and plot. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Sean Penn graduated to full stardom with the 1984 drama Racing with the Moon, even though the film itself hardly set new box office records. Set in the early years of World War II, the film stars Penn as a small-town teen-aged hotshot, six weeks away from being shipped out to fight overseas. In the meantime, Penn begins to date Elizabeth McGovern, whom he assumes is from a wealthy family. Penn's pal Nicolas Cage, who's gotten his girlfriend Suzanne Adkinson pregnant, imposes upon Penn to hit up McGovern for the abortion money. That's when Penn discovers that the girl barely has a penny to her name. Convinced that Penn cared for her only when he thought she was rich, McGovern walks out on him, but later teams up with Penn to help the unfortunate Adkinson. The plot is pure James Dean, a fact not lost on fans who regarded Sean Penn as the second coming of Dean. A very slight piece, Racing With the Moon is buoyed by the engaging performances of the stars, and by director Richard Benjamin's meticulous attention to period detail-especially in those peerless bowling-alley and skating-rink sequences. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In director/writer Curtis Hanson's 1987 chiller The Bedroom Window, architect Terry Lambert (Steve Guttenberg) experiences a most disorienting turn of events when his French lover, Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert) - the wife of his boss - walks over to the titular window in-between lovemaking sessions and witnesses a mysterious man strangling a helpless victim (Elizabeth McGovern). By the time Guttenberg comes to the window, he can see only a crowd of spectators. Because Sylvia wants to avoid a messy involvement in the case (which would soil her reputation, ruin her marriage and cost Lambert his job), Guttenberg agrees to pretend that he witnessed the attack. The ruse, of course, leads to a myriad of complications. And meanwhile, with the psycho still on the loose, Lambert sets out to find him. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An aspiring writer faces up to the responsibilities of marriage and family in this romantic comedy from writer, director, and producer John Hughes. Despite the misgivings he pours out to best friend Davis McDonald (Alec Baldwin), Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon) marries high-school sweetheart Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern). After an abortive attempt at graduate school in New Mexico, the couple settle in suburban Chicago. Jake fakes his way into a job as an advertising copywriter, while Kristy settles into her own corporate job. The couple face the typical ups and downs of any new marriage, especially after Davis visits with a bimbo on his arm, regaling his pal Jake with tales of the good life. A few years later, Kristy decides to stop taking her birth-control pills -- and tells Jake about it three months later. Plagued by doubts, unfulfilled ambitions, and images of a fantasy girl (Isabel Lorca) he once spotted in a club, Jake resists the idea of fatherhood. Then he finds out he has low sperm count and, his manhood thus challenged, lines up for fertility clinic-assisted stud duty. The birth doesn't go as smoothly as Jake expected, however, setting the stage for climactic realizations. Edie McClurg, who played the nosy school secretary in Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off, makes a cameo appearance as an officious neighbor. In addition, a who's who of other Hughes alums and Hollywood stars lend their faces and voices to a series of closing-credits shots in which each suggests a name for the titular baby. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Natasha Richardson) sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape across the border. Kate herself is transformed into a handmaid -- a surrogate mother for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country's fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the bizarre cult of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds herself ensconced at the home of the Commander (Robert Duvall) and his frosty wife, Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway). Forced to lie between Serena Joy's legs and be penetrated impersonally each month by the Commander, Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns that since many of the nation's powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she may have to risk the punishment for fornication -- death by hanging -- in order to sleep with another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d’être. When that other man turns out to be Nick (Aidan Quinn), the Commander's handsome, sympathetic driver, Kate grows attached to him -- and eventually pregnant with his child. Only the mysterious rebel affiliations of her fellow handmaid, Ofglen (Blanche Baker), seem to offer any chance of giving her unborn child a life of freedom -- or finding the daughter she already lost. Loosely adapted by Harold Pinter from the novel by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale also features Elizabeth McGovern in a small but pivotal role as Moira, a "gender traitor" who befriends Kate at the handmaids' reprogramming center. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Shock to the System is a black comedy about a middle-aged advertising executive (Michael Caine) who loses his long-awaited promotion to a younger man (Peter Reigret). In frustration, Caine accidentally pushes a panhandler in front of a subway train--and he gets away with the death. Realizing that committing murder might be a little easier than he previously had thought, he begins plotting the murder of several of his corporate enemies. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

When first telecast in Britain in 1991, Ashenden consisted of four hour-long episodes. When the production was shown over America's A&E cable service on June 7 and 8, 1993, the four episodes were combined into two, with a brace of stories offered in each 2-hour dollop. In A&E's second installment of Ashenden (see entry 123760 for details on the first), our hero, a British playwright-cum-WWI secret agent, travels to Russia with an American businessman (Rene Auberjonois) on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution. He then becomes fed up with the whole espionage business upon meeting an American war widow in Italy. Alex Jennings is starred as Ashenden, a thinly disguised version of Somerset Maugham himself. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Steven Soderbergh, after the success of sex, lies, and videotape and the commercial failure of Kafka, pulls a rabbit out of his hat with this quiet and evocative recollection of a childhood lived in the Depression, based on A. E. Hotchner's memoir. Twelve-year-old Aaron Kurlander (Jesse Bradford) is coming of age in a rotting working class section of St. Louis in 1933. As the film begins, Aaron's family is coming apart at the seams due to the increasingly bleak economy. His father (Jeroen Krabbe) ekes out a living with a series of failed sales jobs as the family lives in the dilapidated Empire Hotel in a seamy section of town. When his younger brother (Cameron Boyd) is sent to live with relatives to save expenses, his consumptive mother (Lisa Eichhorn) goes away to a sanitarium and his father abandons him to sell watches in Iowa. At first Aaron retreats into a concocted fantasy world but he gradually becomes drawn into the shattered lives of the tenants of the hotel. Aaron sees the rotting social fabric laid bare and discovers he must temper his childhood dreams with the hard-hitting realities of adult existence. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

A fiancee goes to great length to get out of her impending marriage in this British made-for-television movie, which is based on the play of the same name. Elizabeth McGovern stars as a woman about to get married, who meets her one true-love -- who is not her fiancé -- and devises a murderous plot to get rid of her groom-to-be. ~ Bernadette McCallion, All Movie Guide

This was billed as the first dramatic feature to be shot in IMAX 3D. It was first shown at Sony's new IMAX 3D Theater in New York on an eight-story high screen. The story is based on the true-life tale of two French aviators, Jean Mermoz and Antoine de St Exupery, who in 1930 formed the first company to fly mail between South America and France. In those days it was a dangerous journey and the pilots needed a special kind of courage to make the trip. One of their new pilots, Henri Guillaumet flies the dangerous route between Santiago and Buenos Aires. During one trip, he crashes in the Andes during a fearsome storm. Later Exupery flies a rescue plane overhead, but is unable to see Henri, who decides to walk out on his own. Meanwhile, Henri's patient wife Noel and her beloved little dog anxiously hope that he will survive. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

A Mobil Masterpiece Theater adaptation of the Arthur Miller play, the film is set in 1938 Brooklyn and involves unhappily married Jewish couple Mr. and Mrs. Gellburg. When Mrs. Gellburg suffers paralysis in her legs, Dr. Hyman (Mandy Patinkin) diagnoses her problem as psychologically stemming from her anxiety over both her failing marriage and the brewing catastrophe in Germany. This film version of the play is infused with acclaimed performances from Mandy Patinkin, Margot Leicester, Henry Goodman, and Elizabeth McGovern. ~ Sarah Sloboda, All Movie Guide