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From: jon@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Jonathan Gingerich)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re Dance with a Stranger
Message-ID: <2364@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Sep-85 21:25:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2364
Posted: Wed Sep 25 21:25:57 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 19:18:30 EDT
Reply-To: jon@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Jonathan Gingerich)
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Organization: System Development Corp. R+D, Santa Monica
Lines: 34

I have to agree with Jeff Meyer's accessment of "Dance with a Stranger".
The three prinicipals are neither likeable nor interesting.  Even the
Ian Holm character clings so long and is so generous to Mrs. Ellis that you
end up feeling he is somewhat responsible for the tragedy.  The plot does
not build up to the climax, but winds down to it.  Mrs. Ellis
first appears to be a worldly women, tough, and in charge, determined to 
provide a future for her son she does not enjoy herself.  By the end of
the film she mewls about how her lover has broken a promise to take her
son to the fair.  Her lover, a disolute upper class lout, does seem to be
getting things together, but just marginally.  In between a sorid tale of
humiliation and obsession left me anxious for the murder.  Particulary
disturbing was the last letter written by the real Mrs. Ellis, which sounds
callous and absurb and does not even mention her son nor the Holm character.
	Siskel and Ebert commented favorably on the movie and Ebert was
particularly complementary about the willingness of the director to leave
questions like "What makes their love so obsessive?" unanswered, unlike
Hollywood.  This is a particular theme of his, but it seems to me
you can blanket a bushel of ills with this criteria.  Except for the first
torrid love making, there is little spark between the two principals.
If Mrs. Ellis had been more vunerable from the begining, and we had seen what
the possibility of marriage, however unlikely it might be, could mean to her, I
would sympathize more with her crime, but instead a manipulative, tough
and resourceful women is reduced to jelly by a disagreable ninny, and it
feels like sickness.
	The film does have two extremely fine merits.  The cinimatography is
impeccably seemless and never for a moment to do you doubt you are in '50s
Britain.  The indoor scenes, the club, the apartments, contrasted with an
occasion exterior effectively in create a somber, doomed mood, but
again, that may work against the film as a whole.  Miranda Richardson acts
marvelously, with a face full of life and busy bird-like mannerisms that
dazzled me; I certainly look forward to her next role.  (The clip they showed
on "At the Movies", "Well take two aspirin ..." was one of the few moments
I felt she struck a false note, however.)  A film like a sheep's head,
magnificently prepared, but rather unappetizing.


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