Blaze
1989VOTE NOW
| Buena Vista Pictures | Release Date: December 13, 1989 |
Starring:
Brandon Smith, Gailard Sartain, Garland Bunting, Jay Chevalier, Jeffrey DeMunn, Jerry Hardin, Lolita Davidovich, Paul Newman, Richard Jenkins, Robert Wuhl
Summary:
A middle-aged Louisiana governor (Paul Newman) falls in love with a young stripper (Lolita Davidovich), jeopardizing his political career and the radical policies which have made him a controversial figure.
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Blaze is essentially a farce with moral overtones. Newman appropriately plays Long for laughs, but he also shows us a complex man with some admirable characteristics and much sadness inside. [15 Dec 1989, p.3F]
Writer-director Shelton builds his story around Starr's and Long's scandalous affair, capturing Long's unprecedented bid for a fourth gubernatorial term and his fight against Louisiana's voter registration law, which disenfranchised illiterate blacks. Through Long's eccentric and purportedly immoral behavior, Shelton captures the last gasp of American innocence when public officials could do as they pleased with minimal scrutiny by the press. Handsome, fulfilling, though not entirely perfect movie. [13 Dec 1989, p.1D]
Blaze is a high-spirited, though slightly botched follow-up to Shelton's appealing Bull Durham of 1988, drawing on the same combination of enthusiastic heterosexuality and cozy male bonding. Politics here takes the place of baseball in the earlier film: another all-American team sport, with its veterans and rookies, official rules and unspoken scams, high idealism and casual corruption. [13 Dec 1989, p.1C]
Blaze has been beautifully photographed by Haskell Wexler in the soft, lulling colors of the Louisiana countryside, against which Ms. Davidovich's amusingly garish costumes stand out as markedly as they're meant to. The costumes, by Ruth Myers, are particularly good, with ice-cream-colored suits for Mr. Newman that allow him to dominate the film visually just as surely as he dominates it dramatically.
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Shelton doesn't quite engage with the material; the picture is lame and rhythmless. Still, it's never boring, and it offers a ribald view of Southern politics that contrasts with the stern melodramatic portrait of Earl's older brother Huey as a fascistic demagogue in the 1949 film All the King's Men.
Blaze may be the least sleazy movie about whoring since The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Paul Newman stars as Louisiana governor Earl K. Long in this sanitized romance adapted by director Ron Shelton from the autobiography of Blaze Starr, the Bourbon Street stripper who supposedly stole Long's heart.
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