Frank Galati Movies

This made-for-cable version of Arthur Miller's play The American Clock was adapted for television by Frank Galati. Inspired partly by Studs Terkel's oral history Hard Times, and partly by Miller's own recollections, the film is set at the beginning of the Depression. When the stock market crashes, the well-to-do Baumler family (John Rubinstein, Mary McDonnell, Loren Dean) loses everything. The Baumlers are forced to move from their plush penthouse apartment to the less-attractive Brooklyn digs of Mrs. Baumler's sister (Joanna Miles). Twelve-year-old Lee Baumler (Dean), the Arthur Miller counterpart, hits the road to find out how others are coping with the Long National Nightmare. The alternately depressing and uplifting storyline moves along briskly to a surprisingly abrupt climax. Kelly Preston, David Strathairn, Eddie Bracken, Darren McGavin, and Estelle Parson co-star in The American Clock, which premiered over the TNT Cable Network on August 23, 1993. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

College student Pondo Sinatra (Matthew Causey is anything but a party animal in this sexually explicit, low, low-budget film about his main goal in life: luring coeds into his boudoir, or wherever. Pondo is more successful at attracting flies than women, and so he begs the Devil himself to help him out a little -- and lo and behold, the winsome Miranda (Suzanne Ashley) shows up as if on cue. Some foggy dream sequences are probably meant to explain her presence, but exactly who she is seems to be irrelevant to connecting one sexual sequence with another -- which apparently need no real reason for continuity anyway. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi