We spent our college Christmas holiday break working along side our Dad at his Hi-Fi electronics store.....(we still sold 8 track tapes......Google 'em if you have no idea what we're talking about....)
After our mild, uneventful adolescence, Dad and I had finally hit a brief patch of time when we couldn't stand each other, when every minute together seemed to end in a nasty petty argument.
Generation gap strife? Political divide? None of the above.......it just seemed like we rubbed each other the wrong way, in every possible way.......more like the kind of fights you'd see between two brothers rather than a father and son.....
And so after a long day at the downtown Philadelphia store, we took in one of the many movies that opened Christmas week, "Lady In Cement".......a perfect father-son movie night.
Except that we kept up the peeved snapping squabbles (over what I can't even remember) right up to arriving in the theater lobby. At one point, one or the other of us threatened to walk out of the theater and catch the Market Street street train to go home.......
We can't say watching this film together made things any better. Sinatra wandered through the movie, barely staying awake. Raquel Welch, in her prime, showed up for the camera to linger over her spectacular superstructure. Assorted shootings and murders occur, poorly staged and never really explained in any detail. You could smell the disinterest coming from Sinatra and rest of the cast......
With two startling exceptions......a funny turn by "Bonanza"s Dan Blocker as a mountainous thug who periodically shows up to pound people senseless and toss Sinatra around as if he were a naughty toddler......and young Lainie Kazan, long before her days of playing hefty Jewish mothers, as a cheerfully seductive Go Go dancer. Her brief scene with Sinatra, dripping with sexual innuendo, dwarfs any similar posing by Raquel Welch, who in comparison, comes off like a slightly animated inflatable woman......
The good news.......that bad time between the BQ and Dad quickly passed......we spent the rest of our days together as a loving, supportive father-son duo. The bad news.....49 years later, "Lady In Cement" still stinks on ice. And we're officially done ever returning to it. 1 star (*) And Dad....if there's an afterlife and you check in on this blog.....love you.
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