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Saturday, February 18, 2012

There Goes The Bride (1980)

On the day of his daughter's (Toria Fuller) wedding, an advertising executive (Tom Smothers) is hit on the head and when he recovers, he sees a 1920s flapper (Twiggy) that no one else can see. Perfectly dreadful. Is there anything worse than a piece of leaden whimsical farce? All of the characters run around frantically, carrying on hysterically as if they did it loudly and quickly enough no one would notice how unfunny it all is. It's all to no avail, the movie is D.O.A. Smothers is fine in small doses but can't carry a film (though he fared much better in De Palma's GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT) and poor Twiggy is left floundering with no one to play off of. Her character is named Polly, no doubt after the 20s flapper she played in THE BOY FRIEND but whereas Ken Russell nurtured her carefully in that film, she's all adrift here. It's embarrassing to see such fine actors as Martin Balsam humiliate themselves. Only Geoffrey Sumner as the bride's grandfather, seemingly unaware of how bad the movie is, gets into the spirit of things and one can see what the movie might have been. Directed by Terry Marcel. The cast includes Sylvia Syms, Phil Silvers, Hermione Baddeley, Broderick Crawford, Jim Backus and Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales (RIO BRAVO).

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