IN FOREVER Young (today, World, 9.30 pm) Daniel McCormick (Mel Gibson, left) wanted happiness. Don't we all. As a test pilot, McCormick spent his days zooming around America's pre-World War II skies and his nights swooning round his childhood sweetheart. But alas, the sweetheart gets squashed by a truck and rendered comatose. Goodbye happiness. As he's too all-American-hero to end it all he does the next best available thing: he gets himself cryogenically frozen. That was in 1939. In 1992 he accidently wakes up, and - lucky for Daniel - he has Jamie Lee Curtis to swoon over him. Happy again? Watch the movie.
It might sound slushy but in fact it works. Both Gibson and Curtis are solid. Gibson displays a nice mix of bewilderment and heroic old-fashioned gallantry and Curtis pleases as the good-natured but cynical nineties woman. The script plays as it should be: straight. And the plot, without plodding down that oft-trod sentimentalist path, presses all the right buttons. It's one to lie back and enjoy. Be happy.
In Martin Scorsese's The King Of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) wanted fame. Again, don't we all. Pupkin, though, wanted it more than most. Pupkin is a nerdish, socially inadequate, aspiring comedian who lets his obsession about becoming a chat-show host take over his life. To make the break to big-time entertainer he kidnaps his idol, chat-show mega-star Jerry Langford. Big mistake. It's not pretty stuff and it's not meant to be. All the same, it oozes quality. De Niro is just superb, as is Jerry Lewis the Carson-inspired chat show king, Langford. And Scorsese is at his very best. He takes no prisoners, pitching his audience right into the pulsatingly mad world of Pupkin and - like it or not - there they remain until the end. Scorsese's cynical school of sit up and squirm cinema was never better.
In Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, 'Scottie' Ferguson wanted nothing more than love. Or did he? Hitchcock being Hitchcock, it's not as easy as that.
On paper, it looks simple enough. Scottie, a retired police chief (played by a sublime James Stewart, left) is hired by an old school mate to keep an eye on his wife (Kim Novak). Stuttering Stewart does more than keep an eye on her. He falls in love with her. Happy ever after? Of course not. When apparently she falls to her death, Stewart is beside himself with grief. Then he sees her in the street. Or does he? The Hitchcock cinematic teasing begins.
Scottie suffers from vertigo and, as Hitchcock examines the phobia, he also examines humanity's weak, psychological frailty. The result, just like vertigo, leaves his audience dizzy, off balance and confused. Hitchcock hit a powerful peak here. Vertigo is harsh, bleak but undoubtedly brilliant. Love had nothing to do with it.