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Reviews
The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959)
Such a waste of talent
This wretched movie is currently receiving wide play on the Fox Movie Channel. It is so sad to watch these Hall of Fame caliber actors try to save a terrible script by an over the hill Walter Reisch. To have Clifton Webb, Charles Coburn and Dorothy McGuire in one movie and squander their talents is unforgiveable. The misogynist Mr. Pennypacker is presented as an intellectual for deceiving his wife and neglecting his 17 children. Instead of challenging the selfishness of Mr Penny packer, Walter Reisch makes him the hero and those who oppose his scheme are portrayed as close minded antiquainted villains. And despite their absentee father, the children are all depicted as precocious and well adjusted. Hollywood abused it's child actors in those days and this film shows why- they are singularly depicted as happy victims. The only good thing about this movie is it was filmed competently.
Sweet November (1968)
Sweet November epitomizes the 1960s
Sweet November was one of those 1960s movies that aspired to be great. The conversations between the characters were incredibly talky like most 1960s Broadway plays and not like real people talk but hey it's a movie, why not? I was ready to buy into the fantasy. It's also fun to see New York as it was collapsing into Mayor Lindsay chaos. The sad thing is Sweet November ended up being propaganda to push a still somewhat uptight country into a complete breakdown of marriage. Infatuation is presented as "true love", perhaps the most destructive concept Hollywood ever foisted on an gullible public and the especially vulnerable Baby Boomers who were coming of age in Sacred '68. My god, one wouldn't even know how a woman behaved during her full menstrual cycle before your month of sexual access was over. How incredibly naive. Anthony Newley is quite compelling and gets you to root for him. How sad his career was about to implode. He was such a talent that he couldn't focus in one direction and go with it. We have nobody like him today. Too bad he wasted his talents promoting such a cancerous message to America.Now we have the fruit of Sweet November: an almost 50% illegitimacy rate and children growing up without fathers. Sweet November defies science that tells us women bond to the men they sleep with thanks to the wonder hormone "oxytocin". But the radical feminism so in vogue in those heady days of the 1960s of radicals like Germaine Greer was expressed in the plot that women must be sluts to destroy their dog-like devotion to men and be free of enslaving patriarchy. Sweet November is an interesting historical piece that someday will be exhumed to show why America collapsed from within.