Very Cool!!!

the audience applauded

Lack of good storyline.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The melding of two novels by John Steinbeck, "Cannery Row" and "Sweet Thursday" into one long, boring movie starring Nick Nolte as Doc and Debra Winger as Suzy. Plot follows her arrival in Monterrey and moving in Cannery Row where she becomes a hooker and he lives and collects sea specimens.The original Stenbeck novel took place during the Great Depression while its sequel picked up after World War II. This film jumbles it all together into one unsaid time frame.Nolte and Winger bring nothing to their roles and seem to just walk thru the film, with a few outrightly embarrassing moments such as their attempts to dance to "In the Mood" and the scene where she has moved into an industrial boiler.Also terrible are Sunshine Parker as the Seer and Frank McRae as Hazel, a character clearly borrowed from Steinbeck's own "Of Mice and Men." Neither one of these guys can act. Almost all of the supporting players and extras goon and ham their ways thru their various scenes. They act like cartoon characters.The saving graces of the film are thee supporting players. Audra Lindley is very good as the Fauna the whore house operator, M. Emmet Walsh is good as Mack, and Judy Kerr is fine as the waitress in the beer milkshake scene.While there are some terrific ocean shots along the Monterey peninsula that burst with sun and wind, the rest of the movie is a stagnant mess of lifeless movie sets that depict Cannery Row as a dead zone free of sun and wind. You can almost hear the echoes when the actors speak in the cavernous set.The film is so episodic and disjointed that it requires a droning narration from John Huston to help link the scenes. Then there's the boring "dixeland" style music of Jack Nitzsche that seems to go on forever. The film is a total misfire. With a budget between of about $12M, the filmed grossed around $5M at the box office.Raquel Welch was original cast as Suzy.

As an avid movie aficionado and collector of Hollywood's Golden Years, who has little time for today's processed canned product, I rarely view anything made after 1955.But I thought that Cannery Row would be couple hours of escape with characters that lived simply in an earthier time and place.The opening, with the seagulls at evensong and the bell buoys swaying in the swell, with the fatherly voice narrating augured well.Then the two main protagonists were introduced to us. We had two Hollywood Idols of their day trying to act, or should I say emote, as two losers in a shanty town. That was bad enough, but I followed them into some elaborate expensive Emporium Brothel that was out of Paris of the 1890's with a staff of hookers that outnumbered the towns residents.I couldn't take any more, and at this point I gave up and canned the movie from my collection.I mean, Hunk Nick Nolte in his prime as an eccentric would be marine biologist and reigning beauty queen of the day Deborah Winger as a "drifter"?I am not even related to the Hemingways, but I wanted to sue Hollywood, too :)Take away the references to Hemingway and his book title and you have just another churned out, eminently forgetful, but expensively made TV pilot.

MGM was in a slump in 1982, and nobody knew how to market this episodic, whimsical adaptation of two plot-light John Steinbeck novels. So a lot of people were deprived of a life-affirming, atmospheric wartime romance that preserves the democratic, people-loving tone of the Steinbeck originals. Shot partly on an elaborate sound stage and partly on or near Monterey seaside locations, it's a leisurely collection of likable losers and near-losers inhabiting the titular sardine- canning center that's seen better days. Nick Nolte as Doc, a marine biologist with a not-too-secret past, is perfection, as is Debra Winger as Suzy, a combative but yearning drifter--the movie captures the character's mercurial, changeable nature far better than Rodgers and Hammerstein did in their own adaptation, "Pipe Dream." We'd like to see more of the gang, and don't really get to know Mac (M. Emmett Walsh) and his cohorts very well. But Frank McRae's a wonderful Hazel, and John Huston's narration, much of it verbatim Steinbeck, ties things together neatly. A bit slow, and a bit fanciful, it's nonetheless a wonderful date movie, best experienced with a good California wine.

This film is not for everyone. It is a romance between two characters (played by Nick Nolte and Debra Winger) who seem to be without purpose, living in the Cannery Row district of Monterey, California. Every person in the neighborhood has a kind heart and everyone wants love to bloom between the two star-crossed misfits.Adapted from the works of John Steinbeck, "Cannery Row" uses sets and a crew of characters that feel, somewhat, like inventions of the Muppet factory. Doc and Suzy--the lovers--are definitely the focus of the film and they are played well by Nolte and Winger, but still they feel like caricatures. Everything is just a little too cute. As in a fairytale, we know the outcome and its sugar-coated circumstances before we see it on screen.As I said, the acting is fine. It's the story that will not square with all viewers.