Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [81]
He is not the only man whose vanity and condescending attitude toward women—especially housewives—affects the leading character. Writer-director Jane Anderson doesn’t need to exaggerate the situation because anyone of a certain age can confirm these facts of American life in the 1950s (and beyond).
What keeps The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, on track is the indomitable spirit of Evelyn Ryan, played to perfection by Julianne Moore. She knows her place and doesn’t try to buck the system; instead she works within it, enduring every hardship and setback for the sake of her ten loving children. Nor is she a plaster saint: she suffers mightily but can’t afford to drown herself in tears because life in the Ryan household must go on.
With Edward T. McAvoy’s impeccable production design, Jonathan Freeman’s cinematography, and Hala Bahmet’s costume design in perfect harmony, filmmaker Anderson transports us to another time and place—occasionally breaking the fourth wall to comment on some of the absurdities of the baby-boom era.
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, will serve as a revelation to younger viewers and a time trip for those who lived through the period. It vividly illustrates how unfair some things were (within my lifetime) and how far we’ve come. Most of all it provides engaging and thoughtful entertainment about real people who are worth getting to know.
111. QUEEN OF HEARTS
(1989)
Directed by Jon Amiel
Screenplay by Tony Grisoni
Actors:
VITTORIO DUSE
JOSEPH LONG
ANITA ZAGARIA
EILEEN WAY
VITTORIO AMANDOLA
IAN HAWKES
TAT WHALLEY
One day in 1999, on assignment from Entertainment Tonight, I went to Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to cover the hand-and-footprint ceremony for Sean Connery. The event was also a promotion for his newest film, Entrapment, so his costar Catherine Zeta-Jones was there along with their director, Jon Amiel. At a quiet moment I approached the filmmaker to tell him that his BBC miniseries The Singing Detective was the greatest show I’d ever seen on television, and that I was also an enormous fan of his first feature film, Queen of Hearts. He thanked me and said with a smile, “You know, sometimes I think if those are the only two credits I have on my headstone I won’t have done too badly.”
Queen of Hearts is too fundamentally offbeat to have won over a mass, mainstream audience, but it does have fervent admirers, and I am one of them. Everyone I know who has seen it seems to feel the same way.
I’ve tried to imagine how the concept was pitched to the BBC, but I can’t. Tony Grisoni’s screenplay is so idiosyncratic it offers no point of comparison to any other movie. It opens as a kind of romantic adventure, with Danilo and his beloved Rosa managing to foil her mother, Sibilla, and his father, Vittorio Duse, on what was to be her wedding day. Mama has arranged for her to marry the butcher’s son, Barbariccia, but Danilo and Rosa outwit their parents and make a daring getaway.
They settle in England, with the perpetually furious Mama Sibilla, and while Danilo is working as a waiter a vision comes to him: he learns the secret of winning at cards from a talking pig, and winds up scoring enough money to open his own café in the East End of London. Over the years the life of the café is intertwined with Danilo and Rosa’s growing family. Eventually, Danilo’s aging father joins them. Then one day Barbariccia turns up, still hungering for revenge—and Rosa.
This could be the outline for a melodrama or a farce, but Queen of Hearts is neither. As narrated by the couple’s ten-year-old son—who is as British as his parents are Italian—it has the quality of a fable or a tall tale that has been passed down from one generation to another. The movie embraces fantastical elements and larger-than-life emotions but does so with wit and charm. I can’t think of another family saga quite like it.
With its boisterous picture of la famiglia and its dreamlike quality, Queen of Hearts