Pretty Good

i must have seen a different film!!

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Goldie Hawn plays Kay Walsh and Ed Harris plays her husband, Jack, who enters the service in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Left alone, she--like many women who responded to the need for stateside "manpower"--takes a job at a factory and learns of the joys of hard, meaningful work.A coworker named Lucky (Kurt Russell) tries to get Kay to go out with him. After many months, she succumbs to his attentions and they embark on an affair.The film focuses on Kay and Lucky, but it is really about the social upheaval that occurred during WWII. By necessity, great strides were made in blurring the lines between the standard gender roles. After the war, there was some regression to prior roles, but the genie was already out of the bottle. It was the beginning of lasting changes.Likewise, some rules of (moral) behavior were blurred or bent. In the film, the affair of Kay and Lucky is portrayed as a happy thing, though Kay surely feels guilt. But we also see that the friends and coworkers who surround them also accept their relationship--not necessarily on a permanent basis, but at least for the duration of the war, which to some extent has suspended the conventions of society. When Jack comes home on 48 hour leave, she says, "I'm not the same. And neither are you."The film is not very subtle, but it really captures the era of the forties. The acting is solid but, as others have noted, Christine Lahti as the neighbor and coworker, Hazel, really stands out. For a more compelling film of this era, see "The Way We Were".

This movie belongs to the women, particularly Kay Walsh (Goldie Hawn) and Hazel (Christine Lahti), who following Pearl Harbor Day were thrust into a change of life in obvious ways... then soon realized they were changing, as women, in ways that couldn't have been obvious to anyone at the time. World War II: Probably no event in history combined the collective awareness of a (arguably) free people into such an enormous scale of supreme cooperation for a cause. All the compulsions—from the draft, to rationing, to censorship—were generally accepted without question, and people voluntarily sacrificed of themselves in time, money, and energy to support the soldiers....For my complete review of this movie and for other movie and book reviews, please visit my site TheCoffeeCoaster.com.Brian Wright Copyright 2008

There is a goof that would only be noticed by someone about as old as I am . There is a scene where a car pulls up to a stop sign. In fact the camera puts a rather big part of the stop sign in a brief scene. Now, currently we all know that stop signs have a standard coloring of white lettering on a red background. But in the 1940s, during World War II and perhaps into the 1950s stop signs had black lettering on a yellow background. This is probably not realized by many people born in and after the 1950s because so much of the photography back in those days was in black and white. So, you don't often see a an old magazine photo of a street scene in color so even if a stop sign was in the hypothetical magazine photo it would have to be in color to be noticed. So, the movie showed the stop sign as white on red but to be accurate for the time period it should have been black on yellow. I remember being perhaps 8-10 years old (born in 1942) when the standard stop sign color scheme was changed to present white on red. This was reported to be easier to see by drivers so traffic safety was increased. So, I want to register this blooper by the makers of the film. Moe in Iowa

I said in my first review of this movie that it would never be on DVD. The reason is obvious. That infamous towel scene with Ed Harris. Well, I must admit that I was surprised when the DVD came out recently, but guess what? The scene was edited.That's right. With cinematograhpy by none other than Tak Fujimoto, whose work with Demme yielded Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and who also shot masterpieces like Sixth Sense and Signs, the DVD was nevertheless cropped to take the bounce out of that scene. Now I'm not saying that's the only reason to watch the film, but I'll tell you this. If I had been Goldie Hawn, I would have made the play for Ed Harris instead of Kurt Russell, except that Ed was at the time and still is married to Amy Madigan.Don't buy the DVD.