London. 1961. Doctor Stephen Ward (played by John Hurt) is an artist and an osteopath. He counts among his patients some of the most distinguished men and women in British society, including the Minister of War, John Profumo (Ian McKellen). After meeting two young dancers, Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley) and Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda), Stephen becomes their mentor, the Henry Higgins to their Eliza Doolittle.
Under Stephen’s watchful eye, both Christine and Mandy are soon having affairs with some of the most powerful members of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. Christine becomes the mistress of both Profumo and KGB agent, Yevgeny Ivanov (Jeroen Krabbe), along with maintaining off-and-on relationships with drug dealer Johnny Edgecombe (played by singer Roland Gift) and musician Lucky Gordon (Leon Herbert).
When a disagreement leads to Johnny slashing Lucky’s face and then getting arrested for firing a gun at Stephen’s flat, the public learns the details of Christine’s affair with Profumo. With the scandal rocking the British government, Stephen is a convenient scapegoat and soon finds himself on trial, charged with making a living off of “immoral earnings.”
Based on the real life scandal that led to the eventual fall of Harold Macmillan’s government, Scandal is remarkably faithful to the facts of the Profumo Affair, even if it did leave out some of the more interesting allegations. (For instance, no mention is made of an alleged encounter between Mandy Rice-Davies and President Kennedy.) Though it may seem tame by today’s standards, when Scandal was first released in 1989, it was considered to be something of a scandal itself and it initially got an X rating when it was released in the United States. (The scandal over Scandal is one of the things that led to the MPAA adopting the NC-17 rating to distinguish between films for adults and “adult” films. Of course, it didn’t work as a potential NC-17 still carries the same stigma as the X rating did.)
Scandal holds up well as both a recreation of London on the verge of the sexual revolution and a look at contrast between private and public mores. Both Joanne Whalley and Bridget Fonda are excellent in the roles of Christine and Mandy. Fonda gets to deliver the most famous line of the whole Profumo Affair when Mandy is told that Lord Astor has denied having had an affair with her. “He would, wouldn’t he?” she says. After I watched Scandal last night, I did some checking and I discovered that Bridget Fonda has not made a film since 2002. She is missed.
Not surprisingly, Scandal‘s best performance comes from John Hurt, who plays Stephen Ward as a naive and well-meaning social butterfly who ultimately gets in over his head and pays a steep price for trusting that his friends would remain his friends. Scandal is just one of many movies that proves what a great talent was lost when the world lost John Hurt.
RIP.
Truman Gates (Patrick Swayze) may have been raised in Appalachia but, now that he lives in Chicago, he’s left the old ways behind. He has a job working as a cop and his wife (Helen Hunt) is pregnant with their first child. When Truman’s younger brother, Gerald (Bill Paxton), shows up in town and asks for Truman’s help, Truman gets him a job as a truck driver. But, on his first night on the job, Gerald’s truck is hijacked by a Sicilian mobster named Joey Rosellini (Adam Baldwin) and Gerald is killed. Truman’s older brother, Briar (Liam Neeson), soon comes to Chicago and declares a blood feud on the mob.
Rebel opens the same way as First Blood, with Sylvester Stallone hitchhiking on a country road. Other than that, the two films have nothing in common. For one thing, in Rebel, Sly is wearing a big floppy hat and stops to feed some horses with a big, goofy grin on his face. He also doesn’t get hassled by the man. Instead, he gets picked up by a bunch of hippies in VW microbus.
This was Stallone’s second film, after A Party At Kitty and Stud’s. He was twenty-four years old. The film was originally released under the title No Place To Hide and it vanished until 
