... but not as good as it wants to be. This sprawling drama plays out over a span of decades as it follows a pretty young Parisienne who is seduced and abandoned by an American flier, and who then marries into society with the non-specific purpose of either getting him back or getting back at him. Meanwhile the flier gets married and goes through various crises of his own. The production values are expensive and look good, but the script moves with languorous slowness and, despite some fashionable 70s-style sexual frankness, everything has an old-style Hollywood feel to it, as if the movie had been made 20 years earlier than it was. John Beck and Susan Sarandon in particular seem to have been time warped back to a Ross Hunter melodrama such as Back Street, making their performances seem out of date for the more naturalistic 1970s cinema. Marie- France Pisier emerges as the best thing in the movie, but it's a pretty dull affair otherwise, especially when she is not on screen. Sarandon's career survived this bomb, thanks to Atlantic City a few years later, but John Beck, who was supposed to vault to stardom after this, quickly found himself in the hell of TV guest star shots.
Review of The Other Side of Midnight
