And the Band Played On

Both an engrossing medical whatdunit and a modern American tragedy...It hurtles forward with the urgency of a murder mystery and ends with the suddenness of a nightmare.

The film is certainly a virtuous, star-studded message movie. It's also a docudrama, with all the attendant questions about the fictionalization of facts. But it transcends that by being complicated, intelligent and vibrant. Without a trace of sentimentality, it is very moving. [8 Sept 1993, p.49]

Hip deep in all the chicken droppings about the movie, you would hardly know that it's a damn good movie. [9 Sept 1993, p.109]

Enthralling, must-see television. [10 Sept 1993, p.6EV]

Swift pacing energizes the movie, and Schulman writes compelling scenes for the large cast. Many actors, who have only one scene to make an impression, meet the challenge splendidly. [11 Sept 1993, p.G1]

Even a hobbled rendering of And the Band Plays On adds up to tough and uncommonly courageous television. Excessive tinkering has left the pacing of the film sluggish in spots, but the story is never less than compelling.

It's an ambitious and engrossing combination of mystery story and medical drama - and a powerful reminder that docudramas can be more than true-crime sleaze. [11 Sept 1993, p.1E]

Suffers from excessive ambition, but only through the best of intentions. [10 Sept 1993, p.E-1]

A fine film but one lacking an emotional punch commensurate with its subject. [10 Sept 1993, p.N-1]

What And the Band Played On needs more of are not good actors, obviously, but characters who have depth and texture as well as sheen, for, at its worst, And the Band Played On appears to congeal disparate elements into a single gelatin. The AIDS-fighting good guys are so uniformly good and rigidly conventional that they present a sort of monolithically pastel image that undermines their believability.

The most discouraging aspect of the film is the fact that we can never latch onto these characters in any warm, intimate or sympathetic way. They stand as ciphers in the larger steely drama. [10 Sept 1993, p.]

The storytelling is too diffuse. At times, it's a medical mystery, with Matthew Modine the outspoken lead researcher manning an obstacle course of financial and bureaucratic Catch-22s. Other times, it's obvious agitprop targeting an uncaring Reagan administration and, in a devastating character assassination, self-promoting Dr. Robert Gallo (Alan Alda).[10 Sept 1993, p.1D]

A stiff, one-dimensional portrait of America's early plague years. Flattened by docudramatic techniques and good-versus-evil oversimplifications, the film is politically correct, easy to follow and emotionally empty. Rather than risking gritty personal drama and fully drawn characters, the filmmakers have fashioned a public-health mystery that surveys all the moral and political issues, but never hits harder than a Newsweek cover story. [10 Sept 1993, p.45]