Turning Point

Rating:
Summary: Why isn't this movie on DVD????
Review: 'The Turning Point' was one of the best movies of the late 70's, I can't believe it hasn't been issued in DVD! It had 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and, in a rare instance, two leading actresses (Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft) were both nominated for Best Actress from the same film. It's about two women closing in on middle age, once good friends, both having been promising, competitive ballet dancers with the same company in their youth. Anne Bancroft's character proceeded on to become a successful, internationally celebrated prima ballerina, while Shirley MacLaine's abandoned the ballet scene on the verge of her career breakthrough to marry and raise a family. After twenty-one years, the Ballet company finally comes to MacLaine's Oklahoma City home on tour, and the women are reunited. MacLaine, now the mother of three young teens, begins regretting what she might have been and what she gave up. In addition to envying Bancroft's success, she envies her own eldest daughter's (Leslie Browne's) promising dance talent, and the chummy relationship her daughter and Bancroft begin cultivating as a result of the girl's acceptance into the company.

Bancroft, on the other hand, is an aging prima ballerina whose star has all but faded, and whom the company is slowly but surely putting out to pasture in favor of younger, fresher dancers. She begins regretting the things she's forsaken for her career, such as marriage, motherhood, and a meaningful romance with a special man. In turn, she starts stewing a jealousy of MacLaine's having these things that is as strong as MacLaine's resentment of her career success. To fill in the void, she seeks to endear MacLaine's young dancer daughter to her in a mentor/friend/mothering relationship that she hopes will overshadow and upstage the girl's devotion to her own mother. All these emotions build and build and build till they end up climaxing in a screamfest of accusations and insults between the two leads, that progresses to a classic physical cat fight in the parking lot of Lincoln Center.

Meanwhile, MacLaine's daughter is having problems of her own. She falls for the company's primary male dancer (a handsome young Mikhael Baryshnikov) who turns out to be a ladies man and stomps on her heart. The music, the moods, the gauzy views of MacLaine's drowsy family life in Oklahoma City and the disciplined New York Ballet world in summer, all have the quality of a golden fairy tale, and the dancing sequences performed by some of the best professional dancers in the world at the time are breathtaking. MacLaine and Bancroft are unmatched as the competitive friends, Leslie Browne is flawless as the somewhat airheaded but magnificently gifted daughter, Barishnikov is perfectly believable as the devil-may-care loverboy, Tom Skeritt does a fine job as MacLaine's patient husband, and even the boy and girl who play MacLaine's two younger children are captivating as typical opinionated adolescents.

I hope a DVD for this beautiful film is issued SOON and it is not a case of having to wait till 2007 for the 30th anniversary!

Rating:
Summary: DOUBLY RICH: CAPTIVATING THEME, BREATHTAKING CHOREOGRAPHY
Review: A very fitting title for this "Terms of Endearment" meets "Footloose" offering...a delicate, if somewhat idealistic, treat for people who like subtle emotional vectors.

The theme is sensitive: daughter becomes successful ballerina, makes mother hark back to her own difficult decision to give up her dancing passion to raise a family.

Envious angst and catty remarks ensue, but of course all is patched up towards the end. The performances are sterling all round but the dialogue could have been a little more taut, it is hit-on-the-head-obvious when things get sappy.

But that doesn't matter because it's the choreography that the movie will be remembered for, the ballet sequences are simply stunning. Minor gripe: a couple of ballet scenes have overbearing voiceovers which recap all that the dancer has gone through in life, which interrupts the lyric of the moment a bit. Again, editing may have been in order.

Nonetheless, it makes for an engaging, luminous portrait of dance and its various twists and turns as apt metaphors for the quirky vagaries of life, loves, ambition.

Very decent rental, but a great must-own if you dig chickflicks.

Rating:
Summary: Worth seeing for the dancing
Review: The plot is silly, the "cat fight" near the end is embarrassing, but the dancing is a beautifully filmed record of some of the great ballet dancers of the 1970s. Most of the various pas de deux and other dances, however, were only shown in short excerpts. Actually, a lot more dancing was put on film than made its way into the final version of the movie (I spent a day watching them shoot parts of the Gala Performance sequence on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1976). If all that never-released dance footage still exists in a vault somewhere, it would be great to put it all together either by itself or as a bonus in a special edition wide-screen DVD release of the movie.