AT LONG LAST LOVE

 Peter Bogdanovitch was on a roll when he made "At Long Last Love". He already had "Targets", "The Last Picture Show", "What's Up, Doc?", "Paper Moon" and "Daisy Miller" behind him and was building up something of a stock company of his own when he had the idea of a musical-comedy built around the songs of Cole Porter. Could this be his masterpiece? Well, let's start with the pluses. Firstly there are the songs which are some of the best ever composed so the musical part should have been a cinch but then Mr Bogdanovitch chose to cast it with performers who could act but not necessarily sing or, at least, sing to the level these songs demanded.

Another plus was the look; filmed in colour but with the black-and-white Art Deco style of a Fred and Ginger movie it looked fabulous so perhaps a combination of the look and the score should have been enough but in the end that's really all we get. Any decent musical-comedy needs jokes but unfortunately Bogdanovitch's gags mostly fall flat. Indeed, his script sucks so the best you can say is that this is a good idea that needed a writer. Between the songs, "At Long Last Love" dies a rather painful death.

Madeline Khan comes out of it largely unscathed and Cybill Shepherd is surprisingly charming but Burt Reynolds goes through the movie as if his trousers were pinching him down below while Duilio Del Prete shows he clearly deserves better. Eileen Brennan, on the other hand, is simply an embarrassment. The film flopped though it has now built up something of a cult, (some people really love it), but in the end even those great Cole Porter tunes can't save it and set beside 'proper' musicals it's a bit of a disaster. See it if you must but maybe you'd be better off staying home and listening to Ella's Cole Porter Songbook instead.

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY

 Paul Mazursky's best film but then he was working with great material, in this case Issac Bashevis Singer's novel about a Holocaust survivor who, having moved to America after the war, finds himself with three living wives; he's a bigamist more by design than choice, believing his first wife died in the concentration camps, he remarried in America, (now wife number three is a whole different story).

This is a great tragi-comedy; the situation is farcical and sometimes very funny but the horror of the Holocaust permeates every frame and Mazursky treats the material with the respect it is due. This is a movie that comes close to perfection from the superb period design down to the faultless performances of the entire cast.

Ron Silver is superb as Herman, a man confident enough to try to balance three relationships at once, convincing himself he loves all the women in his life, Angelica Huston, the wife who returns from the dead, Margaret Sophie Stein as the simple servant girl he marries after the war and Lena Olin as the clinging beauty who emotionally blackmails him into marriage. Herman is a liar and a cheat and a shyster but Silver makes him hugely sympathetic, an amoral man who, nevertheless, wants to do right by everyone but who is constantly doomed to failure. This is a great movie that deserves to be better known.

THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE

 A Z-Movie classic. Hard to believe that "The Devil Thumbs A Ride" only clocks in at sixty-two minutes since there are enough characters for at least three movies, not to mention a great plot about a murderer, Lawrence Tierney, (the only real 'name' in the cast), who hitches a ride with somewhat inebriated travelling salesman, Ted North, picking up Nan Leslie and Betty Lawford on the road. Director Felix Feist also wrote the cracking script from a novel by Robert C. DuSoe and there isn't a wasted frame. If the cast weren't particularly well-known, Tierney excepted, the performances are surprisingly good and, best of all, nothing really happens quite the way you expect it to. This is, in fact, a gem that has built up a considerable cult reputation over the years and is infinitely better than many major studio pictures of the period.