Like Gene Hackman, Ellen Burstyn is one of those actors whose outward normalcy and everywoman demeanor make her deceptively versatile acting skills resonate even more. Still one of our most respected actresses, she had quite a run of quality leading roles in the 1970's, and this time-spanning 1978 comedy was one of the few purely romantic parts she played. That's because she became enough of a box office draw to be able to repeat her Broadway role here unlike 1987's 84 Charing Cross Road which Anne Bancroft essayed in her place. Burstyn is paired here with Alan Alda, then riding high from the long-running M*A*S*H series, playing a couple, Doris and George, happily married to other spouses with six children between them. They meet by chance at a Mendocino B&B during a weekend in 1951, and the movie tracks the affair that develops between them once a year in the same inn over the next quarter-century. Picking up on their illicit activities every five to six years, their trysts become statements of their times and also of their evolving marriages.
The movie is a deliberately contrived set-up made up almost entirely of dialogue between the two principals and patched together by familiar, Life Magazine photo images of the intervening years. Bernard Slade adapted his own hit play for the screen, and some of the stagebound strain shows in the interplay. Director Robert Mulligan, who made To Kill a Mockingbird and Love With the Proper Stranger in the early 1960's, shows a sure hand with the actors, but there is little of cinematic interest here. Already well into her forties, Burstyn is still convincing in showing the evolution from a naïve 24-year-old Oakland housewife to a fifty-year old retiree with aplomb. It's the direct sincerity of her characterization and the minor changes in voice and manner she employs to show Doris' growing maturity. Even though the camera belies her years early on, it's still a masterful turn. Saddled with the more contrived and exaggerated lines, Alda is less impressive as George relying more on his recognizable Hawkeye mannerisms except in the most dramatic episode set during the Vietnam War years. The postcard-perfect Mendocino setting and treacly Marvin Hamlisch music supplement the aura of romanticism necessary for this type of confection. The 2004 DVD has no extras.
The movie is a deliberately contrived set-up made up almost entirely of dialogue between the two principals and patched together by familiar, Life Magazine photo images of the intervening years. Bernard Slade adapted his own hit play for the screen, and some of the stagebound strain shows in the interplay. Director Robert Mulligan, who made To Kill a Mockingbird and Love With the Proper Stranger in the early 1960's, shows a sure hand with the actors, but there is little of cinematic interest here. Already well into her forties, Burstyn is still convincing in showing the evolution from a naïve 24-year-old Oakland housewife to a fifty-year old retiree with aplomb. It's the direct sincerity of her characterization and the minor changes in voice and manner she employs to show Doris' growing maturity. Even though the camera belies her years early on, it's still a masterful turn. Saddled with the more contrived and exaggerated lines, Alda is less impressive as George relying more on his recognizable Hawkeye mannerisms except in the most dramatic episode set during the Vietnam War years. The postcard-perfect Mendocino setting and treacly Marvin Hamlisch music supplement the aura of romanticism necessary for this type of confection. The 2004 DVD has no extras.