Rating : - Combo of Chorus Line, Golden Girls, & 42nd Street
Liza Minelli is such a brilliantly expressive actor and dancer, that she can overcome any tired cliche that's thrown at her (starting with the title of this film), and this one has cliches that weren't even cliches in 1991. She's so great in every scene that the viewer forgets that the talents of Andrea Martin, for example, are wasted. Wasted. Shelley Winters gets a slightly better chance to show her skills, as the wizened, retired theatre exponent who nonetheless plays piano part-time for the troupe, almost *defiantly* lousy. (But at the big show, there she is in the orchestra pit!).
Yes, men are beasts throughout this early-era militant feminist flick. The only non-beast is the solitary xy-entity in the class, a sissified straight guy, badly acted and terrifically danced by Bill Irwin.
Liza plays a very talented but luckless dancer, good enough to be a successful understudy for a Broadway musical, but with a seven year period of rejection. She moves on to teaching dance during the day and singing in boyfriends' sorta jazz-rock group at night. Talkin' 'bout "beasts", this dude is a real sullen one; he's splittin' for the coast despite his lady's committment to a charity and the discovery that he's gonna be a daddy. As much as Irwin overacts, this guy is like some Kris Kristofferson wannabe, without the cigarettes and major chords. Amazing how the progressive, independent, intellectual Mavis (LM) has hooked up with this downbeat, self-absorbed bar band legend. She looks him straight in the eye and says, most demonstratively, she may or may not let the child be born, anyway. She'll telephone him when she works that part out. Her charity seems to extend to raising money for groups of people but not extending the gift of life to one. That's her Constitutional right...but it's a depressing turn in the character development for this plotline.
Another bad guy is the violent husband of another dancer, a meek, peaceful soul who works her heart out for the homeless, but somewhere along the way married a class-A humiliator, and over-rated Corporate climber. He shows up at the benefit to rip his wife away from the proceedings - but her meek male counterpart, Irwin, throws a punch at this guy...and he ducks away. Earlier, she established that the answer to a horrible marriage is to filander with the dancing partner. Interesting.
The movie spends alot of time with the back-stories of the dancers - a la "A Chorus Line" - and not enough with the actual footwork. How in the heck could they get that great with Shelley playing "chopsticks" in three tempos all day. And why wasn't she relegated to part-time receptionist when Irwin demonstrates a boogie woogie piano style that would turn Jerry Lee Lewis' head? No, no - we'll stick with Shelley and the play-by-numbers.
Okay, if we're gonna keep our shaky keyboardist, how can we polish our act? She's not exactly resourceful on the 88s. The film should have spent some kind of time on how these amateurs delt with *that* challenge.
In the end, we have the kind of Hollywood Musical that Liza Minelli's Mother and friend/co-worker Mickey Rooney excelled at. And the finale does have that "feel good" feeling - but coming from the dancing, from teamwork, not from assertions of independence.
And we have an added element to the big finale - Mavis gave birth! She didn't abort the child because she was too busy being a humanitarian!!