FROM THE ARCHIVES (11/16/13): IF YOU COULD ONLY COOK and THE LAST ACTION HERO

 

Woke up feeling kinda crummy this morning-- first inklings of a winter cold to go along with the delightfully gloomy weather outside today (the weatherbots on local news assure me all will be back to sunny normality early this week). All I felt like doing was (surprise!) watching movies, so I wrapped up in a blankie and started in on the DVR queue. First up was If You Could Cook (1935), a charming romantic comedy (it didn't seem screwy enough for the "screwball" label, in my view anyway) starring Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur as a disgruntled auto magnate and a down-on-her-luck bench warmer who conspire to get jobs as the butler and cook for an Eye-talian mobster (Leo Carillo). The movie was apparently falsely promoted (according to Leonard Maltin's book) as a Frank Capra joint-- right down to bogus credits in some European markets-- to capitalize on the director's popularity at the time. But as directed by William A. Seiter it stands on its own just fine, with plenty of laughs, surprisingly spiky chemistry between the two leads and a cheerfully cranky supporting turn by Lionel Stander as the mob boss's second in command.

 

I followed up with The Last Action Hero (1993; John McTiernan)-- a 20-year-old relic from a not-all-*that*-different age, which I'd never sat down and watched before. I'll admit I was hoping for a "Misunderstood Masterpiece" sort of revelation, or at least the sort of "Gee-it-ain't-as-bad-as-advertised" moment like the one I experienced with Hudson Hawk a couple of years earlier. Well, forget about "Misunderstood Masterpiece," and it really isn't so bad as to warrant the level of embarrassment it registered for Schwarzenegger and Columbia when it came out-- I remember an awful lot of hand-wringing and pointing of fingers and very impatient reviews (no studio execs flinging themselves from tall buildings, however). But neither is it as clever as it seems to think it is, nor as nimble as a spry, self-aware genre parody should be. Frankly, this deliberately unsubtle picture might have been helped by a better performance by the kid in the lead-- Austin O'Brien isn't exactly Jake Lloyd, but after a while he does make you want to stick him in the back seat with a comic book and threaten to turn the car around and go home if he doesn't shut up. A couple of weirdly prescient winks toward Schwarzenegger's political ambitions gave me the chills too.

The Last Action Hero is a big, loud white elephant, but it's not so much the tin-eared mess I was expecting as it is a movie that hums along with considerable energy (it gets better, briefly, when the fictional characters step into the "real" world) and seems, finally, somewhat indifferent to its own wacky premise. There are some funny jokes along the way, and a clever celebrity cameo or two, but I suspect it'll be longer than another 20 years before I ever see this one again.

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