Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970......51 years later, this movie's storyline could easily end up as a weekly network or streaming 'dramedy'......
Imagine, if you will, a lovable but severely damaged, dysfunctional trio consisting of a disfigured young girl (Liza Minelli), a witty acerbic gay paraplegic (Robert Moore) and a lost soul manic-depressive epileptic. (Ken Howard).
Released from their long term hospital stays, this oddball triumvirate scrapes together enough welfare money to establish their own family unit, leasing a house from an eccentric dowager (Kay Thompson) The nasty guy next door resents them but they're quickly befriended by the kindly neighborhood fishmonger (James Coco).
Then the gang throws caution to the wind and vacations at a plush holiday resort hotel, which leads of all sorts of life changing complications and revelations.
You'd think a film director faced with such a storyline would opt to relentlessly pluck your heartstrings like a symphony viola section and squeeze your tear ducts until you begged for mercy.
But this strange little offbeat item, brimming with pathos, tragedy and hopefulness, came from, of all people, the tyrannical impresario producer-director Otto Preminger, the famous purveyor of epic all star dramas like "Exodus", "The Cardinal", "Advise and Consent" and "In Harm's Way".
Preminger may have gravitated to the small scale, more intimate 'Junie Moon' after the wheels came off his Epic Movie Machine with the disastrous 1967 Southern-Fried melodrama "Hurry Sundown" (see our 6/20/17 post on that jumbo gobbler).
Otto was never much of a heartstring plucker and the film and 'Junie Moon's actors are directed in his usual blunt, obvious style with everybody delivering their lines loud enough for the audience in the cheap seats to hear.
The director still loved envelope pushing whenever he could get away with it (and he always did).....(Minelli's backstory flashback, where her psycho date horribly disfigures her with battery acid, rivals, if not exceeds any horror movie of the period....)
One thing Preminger never skimped on was filling his films with superb talent and the cast members here do uniformly excellent work......Minelli pours on her wounded-waif character that she perfected in 1969's "The Sterile Cuckoo", Robert Moore gifts the film with a comedic, abrasive turn as the paraplegic. (Moore moved on to direct Broadway plays and films himself) And Ken Howard knows how to break your heart as the painfully sensitive epileptic.
How you view this film....well, depends on what mood you're in. You might find it crude, corny, overacted and overdone altogether. Of it might charm you completely, even if it does look like a film whose director yelled and screamed at his actors......
Count us among the latter. 3 stars (***). Sadly for Preminger, it stands as his last watchable movie, since he subsequently went on to direct a woeful string of disasters ("Skidoo", "Rosebud" both of which we promise to cover in the upcoming posts!)
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