Julie Andrews stars in this 1920s madcap musical as the title character, a woman looking to land a job and a husband in the big city, but ends up embroiled with a nefarious white slave trader! Mary Tyler Moore is underutilized as the woman Millie has to rescue from slavery, but Carol Channing chews the scenery in a bizarre Oscar-nominated performance only she could have pulled off. The musical numbers are a little unrelated to the storyline and they do go on a bit long, but there aren’t many numbers in the movie, and I believe they’re all over before the intermission. After the intermission, things move very quickly. Director George Roy Hill (The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) stretches out of his comfort zone so well, the last half-hour will have you wondering if Blake Edwards took over the film. It’s an intentionally silly, over-the-top sort of movie that pays off better than most of its sort.
Robert Redford directs this adaptation of Judith Guest’s novel, about a family reeling from the accidental death of the eldest child. Unlike so many dramas, it’s what you don’t see and what isn’t said that makes Ordinary People such a gut-wrenching, powerfully moving film.
Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, and Mary Tyler Moore give superb performances as family members struggling to reconnect with one another after the tragedy. Hutton won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his raw, riveting portrayal of young Conrad Jarrett. Moore plays his mother, an emotionally unavailable woman barricading herself from further distress by ignoring her family’s problems, even after Conrad tries to take his own life. Sutherland plays the father, the mediator between mother and son, desperately trying to hold his family together. Judd Hirsch appears as Conrad’s therapist, a savior shrink who forces Conrad to confront his guilt and fear.
