Product Description

Oscar® winner Shirley MacLaine is nothing short of brilliant in this gripping drama by acclaimed writer/director Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses). With wit and real wisdom, Desperate Characters brilliantly examines the life of two disillusioned New Yorkers as they struggle to come to grips with the "normal" life with which they can no longer cope. Featuring powerful performances by MacLaine, Kenneth Mars (The Producers) as her disenchanted husband, and a young Carol Kane (The Princess Bride).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40757 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-07-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 88 minutes

Review
There's an old saying in show business that timing is everything. Though it's a long forgotten footnote now, a lot of the Oscar buzz back in 1972 revolved around Shirley MacLaine's risky performance in Desperate Characters, a low-budget "kitchen sink" drama written and directed by Frank Gilroy that seemed decidedly at odds with her recent big budget and big PR films like Sweet Charity and Two Mules for Sister Sara. [] And yet Characters remains one of MacLaine's crowning screen achievements, a performance of searing power and pain that is certainly superior to her ultimate Oscar winning one in Terms of Endearment. Though MacLaine herself dismissed the film as a failure, it nonetheless contains two of the most intense--if relentlessly emotionally tamped down--performances of 1970s film, by MacLaine and the superb Kenneth Mars, both actors completely erasing years of comedic star turns in one fell dramatic swoop. In fact, the entire film, largely a dialogue between MacLaine and Mars as an unhappy Manhattan couple, plays a bit like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on barbiturates. These characters, unlike Albee's volcanic couple, are too "proper" to ever really let their emotions loose, hence their Thoreau-esque lives of "quiet desperation."

The plot, such as it is, revolves around twin predicaments--MacLaine is bit by a feral cat she has been feeding, and Mars' longtime law partnership with Gerald O'Loughlin has just dissolved, to the consternation of both men. It doesn't sound like much, and it really isn't, but under Gilroy's low-key direction and with his absolutely unmatched ear for dialogue, it all unravels (literally) as the perfect dystopian portrait of life crammed into a city where everyone is aching to get out.

MacLaine's Sophie is alternately elegant, earthy, wounded and superior, and MacLaine has never been more commanding on screen than in her portrayal of a modern woman caught in the throes of a rabid society that has just reached out and touched her in a very real way. Mars is simply a revelation in this role. If you know him only through his inspired work in such Mel Brooks films as The Producers and Young Frankenstein, prepare to be amazed at the brutish power of his Otto, a brutishness buried under layers of mild-mannered banalities and well-heeled mores. The shocking denouement, when the couple finds that their country refuge has been vandalized, is a tour de force for both actors and will leave most viewers squirming uncomfortably as the webs these two have weaved with each other ensnare them. []

Desperate Characters is certainly not a film for those who need slam-bang action sequences or conflict spelled out in terms of good guys versus bad guys. For those willing to experience characters through their dialogue (and their silences), this is a widely undervalued gem that sums up the beginning of the independent film movement brilliantly, and it contains arguably MacLaine's finest performance ever

[]

This film should have netted both MacLaine and Mars Oscars. There's simply no justice sometimes. A downbeat, depressing film Desperate Characters certainly is, and yet it reveals some very deep truths about a certain stratum of city-dweller, and does so in a devastating way. If you think of MacLaine as a flighty comedienne, prepare to be stunned by her power and command of a difficult role in this film. Highly recommended. --Jeffrey Kauffman of DVDTalk.com

Customer Reviews

Great Movie!! Re-release this Movie!!
Shirley MaClaine stars in this early 70's great movie concerning disillusioned New Yorkers,but re-release this movie so that humble people such as myself can afford it!!

Waiting for the barbarians
Otto and Sophie Bentwood (Kenneth Mars and Shirley Maclaine) live in a gigantic, messy brownstone in 1970 Brooklyn Heights, but for all intents and purposes they might as well be living in Paris in 1848. Barricaded in from the street and the changing social and political world outside by means of their barred entryway, locks, and intercom system (which are given plenty of attention in this film), the Bentwoods are left to tear each other apart with their mutual dissastisfactions. Then the outdoors slowly comes creeping into their home: first with the bite of a (possibly rabid) cat that Sophie tries to befriend, then with the midnight drunken visit of Otto's former partner in his law firm, then by a young man wanting to use their phone. The Bentwoods begin to discover that there is no safety behind closed doors.

Paula Fox's beautifully claustrophobic and depressing 1970 novel seemed a natural to be filmed because of its compressed time frame over one long unhappy weekend; it might still make an absolutely first-rate film some day, but this Frank D. Gilroy film made a year after the novel was published doesn't quite pull it off. Gilroy was experimenting quite a bit in this film with shots of very dark city streets and with intentionally disorienting jump cuts to shots above the characters after intense conversations that make them look trapped and hopeless; he also deliberately made the Bentwoods' clothes, hairdos, and homes look as awful as possible (even by the standards of one of the least stylish periods in American cultural history). To say the result isn't very cheerful is putting it mildly; but it's also very off-putting in narrative terms. It's hard to much care for the Bentwoods' social world which seems so sterile as to deserve to be doomed, and though it's fascinating to see Kenneth Mars in a serious role, he's exceptionally unpleasant as Otto.

The main reason to see this film is Shirley Maclaine, who delivers perhaps her best dramatic performance here. Her best scenes often are her wordless scenes, when she turns up her beautiful rosy-pink face towards the other actors and stares at them as her mind races. This is such a far cry from the mannered ding-a-ling roles from both her earlier and later years that here she seems quite another actress altogether. With Sada Thompson, who invests her very unlikely speeches with her characteristic dignity and grace, and Carol Kane in a tiny part as a young hippie.

LOST IN DYSTOPIA ( MISERY LOVES COMPANY )
Shirley Maclaine and Kenneth Mars are simply incredible in this film, playing urbanites that seem literally trapped in their own lives. You can almost taste their bitterness, and hopelessness. Neither they nor their friends seem capable of admitting real emotion to show through their sad facades while they are together, and the silences become volcanic, and truly deafening. They don't really seem to care about one another ( Mars, as Otto, is something of a bullying ogre ). Either because they are too socially conscious, or too set in their ways they have apparently not considered divorce. I was unable to take my eyes off from Maclaine. She imbued her character ( Sophie ) with so many complexities that every gesture, or glance said volumes.

This is a very intense, and devastating film, and the Academy was definitely out to lunch in overlooking Maclaine, and Mars at Oscar time. It is also an extremely depressing movie. The plot is secondary to the dialogue, cinematography, and character developement. I loved it.