eebyo Reviews

Original Cast Album: Company (1970)

Elaine Stritch is the beating heart of this recording session.

[9/10 · 22 January 2024]

It's impressive to watch a gaggle of Broadway's best, at almost the exact moment the clock moved from the 1960s into the '70s, take their places in a featureless recording studio to make history. The original cast, the orchestra players, the sound engineers, composer Stephen Sondheim, and session producer Thomas Shepard demonstrate more than great talent and love for what they're doing. They give a master class in how to listen, how to give and take direction, how to hit the creators' target. Near the end, when Ms. Stritch belts out a solo for the ages at 3 a.m., the producer criticizes her delivery, and I wanted to smack him! But I'm not a theater person, unlike the phenomenal troupers who kept soaking up instructions and doing more, more, more takes till everyone was happy. They did it right.

If you own any original cast recording of a Broadway musical, I recommend this behind-the-scenes look at how one OCR was made.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show: 1040 or Fight (1970) Season 1, Episode 11

50 years on, this one's a keeper.

[9/10 · 3 September 2021]

I was a regular MTM watcher in the first few years, and this is the episode I remember best. Geek with a crush was a novelty back then as a romantic lead, as opposed to some clownish regular cast member's crush of the week, and even as a high schooler I noticed Paul Sand's endearing comic chops. (His trench coat looked like he picked it up at Lt. Columbo's yard sale.) Sand's kept fitfully busy in movies and TV over the decades but I don't think I saw him in anything after this. His performance, together with Mary's and Rhoda's and the unforgettable chocolate-to-hips, made all the show's subsequent coulda-been romances seem flat and formulaic. For me, this is the best episode to keep the focus on Mary's home life.

Reaching for the Moon (2013)

Involving, watchable, grown-up - sound like your kind of movie?

[8/10 · 11 November 2013]

I enjoyed this story of a lengthy midlife love affair, "based on" (that is, "not cemented to the known facts of") real women of some mid-century renown. One, American poet Elizabeth Bishop, is quiet, slow to warm to strangers or share working drafts of her poems. See if Miranda Otto doesn't remind you of Deborah Kerr in her memorable 1940s and '50s roles (and clothes). In Brazil to visit an old college friend, Elizabeth meets Lota de Macedo Soares, a charismatic commander of attention and glamorously trousered architect. They become lovers and make their life in Brazil. All the characters, including a close male friend of Lota's and one of Elizabeth's, are revelations in the best sense: mature but unfinished adults, they meet their circumstances over nearly 20 years in ways not even they might be able to predict. Mark Twain said that fiction is obliged to meet our expectations but the truth isn't. Central Casting can provide "types," but history offers people like nobody else, which is why you'll find discussions here and elsewhere complaining that these lesbians were not put through their proper lesbian plot paces! The drunks were sometimes sober! People got depressed without enough foreshadowing! Ignore all that. This is a good quiet story, mostly but not all sad, about people learning themselves as they go, living genuinely if not always bravely.

And anyone who's ever dreamed of having a writer's sanctuary will fall rapturously in love with the al fresco study Lota builds for Elizabeth. Must be seen to be appreciated!

Beauty for Sale (1933)

Snap, crackle, pop . . . smile

[8/10 · 10 December 2012]

This fast, fizzy, deft comedy skirts the Code so nimbly that I couldn't tell just by watching (on TCM this morning, thanks for the thousandth time TCM) whether it's pre- or post-Code. I appreciated so many unsung, supporting, and subtextual things about this ur-romcom that I can't mention them all here. In order of surprise/urgency, the top 5 are:

1. Otto Kruger! Here is the man who clearly should gotten all those roles wasted on Warren Williams - what were producers thinking? (Were they thinking?) They look about the same age, yet Otto's handsomer, less tedious, and possessed of actual romantic and comic acting chops.

2. The writing! Cattiness among beauticians, and the delectable Alice Brady brand of un-self-awareness: "I'm very intuitive." Her literal kiss-off scene with Kruger has never been done better in a comedy, not even by Meryl Streep and *insert leading man here*.

3. The bad boyfriend! An almost complex portrait of a goofball who clearly doesn't deserve the leading lady, but not because he's a bad guy. He's not all good, either. He's just not grown up. It's a forgiving, shaded character, played by Eddie Nugent with a subtlety usually missing from lame runner-up lover roles.

4. The slapstick! I don't care how many takes they went through to print the change-of-driver-in-real-estate-agent's-car scene. The result is totally worth it. I'm actually surprised I've never seen this bit in a TCM montage of silly scenes.

5. Madge Evens! Una Merkel! Listed low, but only for the surprise factor. Both are at or near their very best here. Miss Merkel never gets enough credit for delivering both sides of a double-entendre grilled to smoking hot perfection. Miss Evans does more-or-less blameless ingenue so well it's not boring - this is Carole Lombard territory, and she nails it, sweetly and demurely (well, mostly demurely, see no. 4).

The Great Man's Lady (1941)

What were these A-listers thinking?!??

[3/10 · 9 September 2010]

This is a mess of a movie that, frankly, should not have been made, especially not by a pro's pro like Wellman, not even as a favor to the dependably phenomenal Miss Stanwyck. Italian grand opera has never featured a plot gone this far off the rails. Nor are any of opera's leading saints or scoundrels accorded the admiration plainly directed at the leads in this film, who show less common sense, valor, or candor than Wile E. Coyote brings to a bad day on the mesa.

I won't spoil this turkey for intrepid or optimistic viewers, but I will note that the story nods (so quickly you might miss it) to an entire off-screen family whose existence, if contemplated for more than 10 seconds by any character, would've given some interesting version of this film a problem and points of view worth watching.

"Reefer Madness" handled continuity better than this. Many of the lavish costumes are out of place on relatively bare sets. Joel McCrea's mustache, for heaven's sake, looks like it's about to slip off his handsome face through many scenes!

Turner Classic, bless them, just showed this, earning my continued thanks for gallantly refusing to do my quality control for me.

Society Doctor (1935)

Two career curves intersect on the back lot:

[6/10 · 14 April 2010]

Never mind what this movie is "about" -- it delivers as much useful information about real life as any studio product of its day. The treat, 75 years after it was cooked up, is watching Chester Morris at the top of his game, probably not aware he's about to slip off the peak, just as Robert Taylor learns his way up the ropes of stardom. Hindsight tells us the fast-talking, brisk, athletic, shiny-haired Morris was quickly eclipsed by mellower, moodier, skinnier, equally handsome guys like Taylor, yet the performances here don't explain why or how. Chester Morris delivers the goods, hackneyed as they are; Robert Taylor poses more than he acts. Guess there's no accounting for tastes or headstrong producers.

The story line stays out of the way of this transition, as the two interns played by the actors are rivals in love almost by accident and don't fight each other for the ethereally lovely Virginia Bruce.

Bonus: I like Bruce more every time I see another of her movies. She's overdue for a birthday tribute on TCM.

Little White Lie (1945)

Who's that girl? Where did she go?

[5/10 · 26 March 2009]

I'm so disappointed there are no acting credits here for this little movie. It just screened on TCM, which has no credit info, either. Workmanlike acting from the grownups and decent production values put a sturdy floor under this brief treacly tale of an orphaned girl, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, who goes to the home of a kind sweet couple. They love her and very much want her to stay, but they wait for her to decide for herself not to remain an orphan.

This girl's got chops! a direct intensity and an affecting (not affected) voice. The director knew it, too, and gives her some riveting close-ups. At first glimpse, in pigtailed profile, she looks a lot like the very young Natalie Wood in "Tomorrow Is Forever" (1946), but I'm fairly certain the voice and skin tone are someone else's. But whose? I feel sure if she'd gone on to make more films at any age, we'd know her name.

I hope some reader of this little review will take it into the MGM archive and emerge with a cast list.

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

Is this a John Ford, a Howard Pyle, or an N.C. Wyeth picture?

[6/10 · 11 December 2007]

Ford accomplished something stunning -- he's out of his own exalted league, really -- with the look and feel of this film. Almost every frame is a Technicolor-drenched pictorial tribute to the golden age of boys' adventure-story illustration, an era crowned by the lush, densely detailed book and magazine work of Pyle and Wyeth, which was fading away just as Hollywood got the pictures "moving" in the 1910s. None of the John Wayne-John Ford films I've seen, not even "The Quiet Man," is as compelling visually as this movie, which comes as close to delivering 24 frames a second of tableaux vivants or Saturday Evening Post covers as anything ever projected onto a screen.

A few of the performers are good, notably Claudette Colbert (a tad more disheveled than usual) and Edna May Oliver (much warmer and more endearing than ever). Most of the other talent, even Fonda's, is wasted in the service of dreadful, endless clichés about jug liquor, savage savages, love of the flag, good guys outrunning bad guys, preachers taking up muskets for Jesus, even an African-American servant who seems to be there merely as a perk of the two stars' top billing. Ford makes a much better director than a history teacher, and it frosts me that so many American moviegoers won't or can't see the difference.

All 6 of my stars are for the cinematography, costumes, lighting, blocking, and every other ingredient of the gorgeous set pieces of "Drums." The story, sad to say, just blows.

Cause for Alarm! (1951)

Diary of a Mad '50s Hausfrau

[6/10 · 27 August 2007]

As entertainment, this is a forgettable film. As cultural history, it's not to be missed!

Onetime career woman Loretta Young is the serene, doting mistress of an eerily perfect suburban home. It's a quiet, lonely, exceedingly neat life -- she performs her household chores as though they were sacraments -- until her mopey husband takes a turn for the paranoid. (In fairness to him, she seems to have a better relationship with her various appliances than with her spouse.)

Then Loretta's paranoia takes center stage, and this movie gets its reason for being. She gives an over-the-top performance that, perversely I guess, reminds me of Divine's forlorn housewife in "Polyester." Sweating and trembling until you want to reach out and hand her a martini, Loretta embodies the certainty that her pathetic nutjob husband can and will persuade the world that she's a monster. In 1951, who's to say her assumption was foolish?

Short as this movie is, its story would have taken less than one-third of its running time if any character had had the presence of mind to say "Snap out of it!" to almost any of the others.

In some of the best Fifties movies, everybody looked safe and serene on the outside, wrecked and doomed on the inside, and on this score "Cause for Alarm" would make a great double feature with the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Jamaica Inn (1939)

Hitchcock must have been smarter than his fans . . .

[7/10 · 25 June 2007]

. . . so many of whom are wailing here about being cheated out of "their" preferred Hitch. They demand better suspense! wimpier blonder heroines! a better century! Honestly, folks, Baskin-Robbins can have 31 flavors of ice cream, but Alfred Hitchcock can't have more than one flavor of suspense?

I liked this movie. It's not a thriller, and surely not for the kiddies. It is a multi-character study of depth (and, I'll admit, predictability). Not all the considerable bondage involves ropes and scarves; most of it's social -- painful, constraining, and unattackable as a knot behind one's back. This is, for me, Laughton's creepiest role ever, and that's saying something. He was actually hard to look at. (Am I the only one who got subtle hints that his galloping madness owed something to syphilis?) Almost everyone in the cast contributes some glint of acting genius or gravitas to this Gothic tale of moral choice and social submission. In addition to O'Hara and Newton, who are both outstanding, I have to single out Marie Ney (Aunt Patience), in a role they don't write for women of any age any more, and Horace Hodges (Chadwick, the butler), whose eloquent silence closes out this fine movie.

Pi (1998)

This movie is about . . . what?

[8/10 · 5 April 2007]

Interesting commenters' split here: is this movie about math or about painfully rare ways of understanding reality? Count me among those who understand "Pi" as a movie about mental illness, one of the 2 or 3 best ever made. I won't disagree w/ the folks who say it's about math or mathematicians, but it sure wasn't for me. I gained no new mathematical insights fr/ this film, but I did get weeks' & acres' worth of different new ways to consider how scary and difficult life must be for folks who do not apprehend the world as I (and I think most of us) do.

One other thing this movie was about? Ben Shenkman's acting genius! I saw "Pi" when it was first released - in an art house, duh - and years later, after watching "Angels in America" on HBO, I was belatedly blown away when someone pointed out to me that Louis was the Guy from Pi. His range leaves me speechless. If Brando and Olivier were still here, they'd be jealous.

Fame (1980)

The Movie Electric

[8/10 · 5 January 2007]

If the energy from this movie doesn't enter your system and light you up, please turn yourself in for an autopsy NOW.

I saw "Fame" in its first release (btw, a movie released in 1980 isn't an '80s movie, it's a '70s movie) and couldn't sleep for at least a day. Dramatically it's a bit uneven, tho' storyline strengths knit it together well, but the music comes to the rescue every time. Interestingly, the "impromptu" street and cafeteria jams are no better (but every bit as good) as the staged choral numbers, which really are the full-throated heart of the movie.

If you're looking for a movie that reminds you of high school, or even of your high school play, you'll more than likely be disappointed. If you want powerful music from energetic singers, this is your show -- "42nd Street" for kids not lucky enough (hah!) to have lived through the Depression. And yes, I think it would make an xlnt double bill with "42nd Street." 8/10.

Diva (1981)

Either you get it (you lucky thing) or you don't

[10/10 · 16 December 2006]

It's no overstatement to say that this movie changed my life. Right away, I broke up with the boyfriend who complained it didn't make sense and "her French wasn't very good." Then I started going to live opera performances, and two or three times in the past 20 years I have been privileged to see and hear a leading lady as thrilling and regal as Miss Fernandez. (Who, by the way, has a face the camera loves. Even if she couldn't sing a lick she'd be a screen icon.) What grand opera couldn't do for me as a kid -- make it worth my while to suspend disbelief -- "Diva" did at once, and still does today.

I have often thought, watching this again & again on cable, that MTV in the 20th century and TV commercials in the 21st have dulled viewers' capacity to be dazzled by director Beiniex's visual tour de force. The gas-station apartment, the reflecting street puddles, the mirror shots were all fresh then, if not completely original. (Gorodish's apartment I can take or leave; to each his own.) What devolved by 2006 to "grad film student gimmicks" were take-your-breath-away startling in 1982, when I first saw this film.

Kids, take it from a geezer who knows: See this movie, "Blade Runner," and "Wings of Desire" if you missed the '80s and need to write a report, or if you just want to experience the decade's cinematic high points.

All ages: "Ecoutez." Movies were invented so movies like "Diva" could be made. 10/10.

Brazil (1985)

A Savage Dystopia - just like here & now

[9/10 · 30 September 2006]

All curses have their gifts. Last night, insomnia graced me with the chance to watch this movie again on cable in the oh-dark-thirty time zone, which is probably the best time to watch it.

"Brazil" is the best movie ever made about the War on Terror, notwithstanding that it predated the real thing by 16 years. I respect all Terry Gilliam's efforts, and don't mind the repeated tropes (little people, mythic dragon-slayers), but this is the only one of his movies that scared me. It's acid, pitying, mordant genius.

And much scarier now than it was on release 20 years ago, at least in America, where things like commando raids on fashionable restaurants that spew blood and limbs around the well-heeled patrons who know they can ignore it all -- after all, they couldn't be targets -- are no longer the stuff of fantasy.

Most first-time viewers will be motionless with suspense, and I'm not here to spoil that. I'll just mention a couple of my favorite grace notes and leave it at that:

• the uncanny, creepy marriage of hi tech and late Victorian pneumatic tube-o-mania. The set is a work of design genius, showing the unbearable weight of detritus behind every sleek-looking screen and automated readout.

• Kim Griest. How she managed to disappear (more or less) from films after this one is an enduring mystery to me. A tough dreamgirl for the ages, she should at the very least have sold millions of posters wearing that truck driver's getup. She and Jonathan Pryce give the screen its best androgynous pairing since "Christopher Strong" or "Queen Christina."

There's so much more . . . and if you watch with your eyes open, you'll probably see something I've missed. But there's one character, a senior civil servant, who's a ringer for Dick Cheney. Coincidence? You decide.

Help! My Snowman's Burning Down (1965)

When men were men, and tubs had feet:

[7/10 · 5 April 2006]

This pleasantly ridiculous film was recently screened as part of a film spoof festival at (drum roll, please...) my local public library. In addition to the comic rewards of the alleged plot, which I believe has already been spoiled for you by the previous comment, many of the stylistic touches are fun to behold in all their original mid-'60s pre-mod swankiness. So many of them, from the porkpie hat and the haircut under it to the martini glass, are new again. Possibly the coolest, and definitely the most unnerving, thing about the film I saw was its color -- a monochromatic washed-out pinkish-red, creepily reminiscent of blood in the water, that got more intense as the film went on. This may be an artifact of badly aged film stock or it may have been there from the beginning. Either way, it sets a memorable tone for this little existential plaything.

Bedtime Story (1941)

Twilight of screwball comedy:

[7/10 · 29 March 2006]

All the previous commenters are right: you'll find some things to like here. Exactly which things they are will depend on what you're hoping for. I think Fredric March is terrific as Luke, for the same reason other folks didn't enjoy him so much -- he's not what you're expecting, perhaps because his buttoned-down good looks make a great foil for his deviousness. Here, in mid-career, March's role is the kind Harrison Ford occasionally takes to lighten up. Benchley's Benchley (that's a plus) and Eve Arden has a great turn as an actress who must absorb withering directorial scorn for no good reason. Loretta Young is where this potentially fizzy movie goes flat in spots. She's ladylike to a fault.

After I saw this movie on TCM I decided it must've been written as a Powell-Loy vehicle -- theirs is the kind of chemistry that would've put more zip in this script. But March's performance is a treat.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Gloria Swanson is braver than you . . .

[10/10 · 29 January 2006]

. . . and, no question, braver than I'll ever be. Now that 75 is the new 50, it's hard for us to imagine the sheer moxie -- and the steep risk of career-poisoning mockery -- put into play in 1949 when a 50-year-old actress long past her glamor-drenched prime became Norma Desmond, the only living soul who doesn't know her day is done and her sex appeal is long gone. I can't think of a precedent for a woman taking on such a perilous role in a serious movie, and I doubt that any of today's maturing -- OK, aging -- woman stars would do it on a dare, let alone agree to play side-by-side with film clips from their glory days. There are a few better films and a handful of better performances, but nobody ever undressed her own persona on screen with more daring and to better effect than Miss Swanson. Ten stars and a medal of valor.

Al Roach: Private Insectigator (2004)

Teeny tiny fun! Thanks, TCM!

[7/10 · 17 December 2005]

IMDb's required 10-line minimum means I'll be writing for longer than it'll take you to watch this goofy little film, but rules are rules. (I wish you'd change this one, IMDb.) "Al Roach" is a triumph of 'toon noir, a black-and-white tribute to every Philip Marlowe story you've ever watched or read. It even opens with the Warner Bros. logo, making me think for a while that it was decades older than it is. Verbal and visual puns abound at a pace that would give the Simpsons a run for their money, and the adult situations -- watch the antennae -- will tickle you without damaging the delicate sensibilities of any little ones who may also be watching. It's not original, but it's very worthwhile, delivering silliness of a high order. Credit Turner Classic for keeping up with the times and screening this pestilential homage between its feature movies.

Colorado Territory (1949)

Harsher and more beautiful than I expected

[7/10 · 5 November 2005]

The commenters who called this "Western noir" are on the money. Just about everyone in this movie is a ratlike scheming double- or triple-crosser. Bad guys suffer fates not noticeably worse than the handful of schmo's who are honest (mostly in the relative, honor-among-thieves sense). It's all bleak for the ones who don't get out alive and also for the ones who do.

The one aspect of this movie that may have lost its punch for 21st century viewers is the script's banal dialogue for the two key women characters. Virginia Mayo in particular is better than her lines and her costume, which is fashioned entirely from clichés about wanton women who aren't 100 percent Anglo. But the story arc treats the women just differently enough from the "classic" Western that it held my interest.

The cast, top to bottom, is excellent. Joel McCrea does that thing he does so well *especially* well here. I'd like to see Peter Sarsgaard reprise a McCrea role some day, in either a Western or a Sturges classic.

The Age of Consent (1932)

Separated-at-birth alert!

[6/10 · 10 March 2005]

This is a better cultural artifact than a movie . . . but it's a very watchable movie. Catch it on TCM.

The alert is for Richard Cromwell, who plays the young man in what I'll call "a situation" with a townie waitress. He's a pretty good actor I've not seen in any other pictures -- and a 24-carat ringer for Leonardo DiCaprio! Their resemblance is beyond close; it's frightening: looks, body language, the whole package. (I am not a good judge of voices, but I don't think they're too far apart.) . . . Since IMDb is insisting on 10 lines' worth of comment even tho' I'm done, I agree w/ the other posted comments about the snappy yet smarmy pre-Code tone of this movie. That's what makes it such an artifact. If I were Robert Osborne (and we're all SO lucky I'm not), this movie would be double-billed with "The Story of Temple Drake," a bleaker look at the same good-time era starring Miriam Hopkins.

Those Beautiful Dames (1934)

One-hanky classic

[8/10 · 10 December 2004]

A feel-good cartoon about little toys with great big hearts, this has very dark edges and remarkable dramatic tension for a movie so short and filled with characters who aren't, technically, real. It starts with roots in Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Match Girl" before segueing (though nobody knew this in 1934) into an animated "Babette's Feast." Watch the very last shot; the little girl's mixed feelings could break your heart - if, like me, you get sentimental about the travails of cartoon characters.

Chuck Jones fans will note that he got very junior billing for this.

This is a little gem. I hope TCM recycles it often, especially at Christmas time.

I Married a Doctor (1936)

The Good, the Tantalizing, the Trite

[7/10 · 9 November 2004]

Good: a rock-solid, mug-free performance by Pat O'Brien, whose acting shines through many interludes of silence. Playing the doctor of the title trying to love his wife into some semblance of compatibility, he is the peerless star of this show; now I wonder why so many other screenwriters were anxious to stuff wordy, windy dialogue into his mouth in his other movies. Tantalizing: the lively-to-edgy supporting performance of Ross Alexander, a lost (to suicide) wonder of the '30s screen. A ringer for the young James Woods and a breezy screen presence, he's got the invincible ease that old-movie hounds like myself tend to think John Garfield invented. Watch this film and decide for yourself. Trite: Conformity is so stifling! Truly artistic people just can't be themselves in a small town! Well, not if they stay as angry as the misfits in this movie. O'Brien's morally grounded, subtle understanding of his character and all the others makes this movie better than average: 7/10.

Tin Men (1987)

Finding God @ the smorgasbord

[8/10 · 21 September 2004]

I agree with the commenters who appreciate this movie because of/in spite of its languid pace, hysterical digressions like the one in the caption above, and lifelike mix of the ridiculous and the deeply serious. Since I live on the set, I'm partial to the Baltimore scenes and the only-in-Baltimore scenes, those that have survived and especially others, like Memorial Stadium (glimpsed in the background as two tin men ring their new victim's doorbell), that haven't.

I'm not a particular fan of any of the players, and I never have liked Barbara Hershey, but they all fill their parts beautifully here - especially Danny DeVito, whose pitch-perfect Baltimore accent has never been equaled on film, not even a Waters film. An 8.

The 39 Steps (1935)

"What are the 39 steps?"

[9/10 · 1 September 2004]

Hearing Robert Donat shout out this question near the end of the movie still sends chills down my spine - it is one of *the* great cliffhanger moments in movies, period. Except for the ludicrously overacted mystery woman who appears in an early scene, the cast is a treasure, and if Hitch had never made another movie he'd be remembered gratefully for this one. I hunted down the John Buchan novel on which the film is supposedly based, and found the book to be a leaden, dated, anti-Semitic turkey - which makes this radically re-imagined interpretation even more impressive.

This movie is on my "rent it for me if I'm ever in traction and stuck in bed for 3 months" list. An all-time all-star affair. 9 out of 10.

The Maltese Falcon (1931)

The stuff that naps are made of

[4/10 · 12 July 2004]

Seeing this movie, as I just did for the first time on Turner Classic (which lists it as "Dangerous Female"), can only multiply your appreciation for the 1941 Bogart-Astor version. Ricardo Cortez must have been getting paid by the smirk. I hope he remembered his dentist and his Brylcreem salesman in his will; they made him the actor he was. The women are all good, but no better than that. Well, Una Merkel is a little better. More interesting are the "original" Joel Cairo and Mr. Gutman, who competently deliver many of the individual tics but almost nothing of the set-changing atmospherics of their successors in the roles, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor somehow transcended the essential seediness of their characters in the remake; here, Sam Spade and Ruth Wonderley(!) can't.

This movie doesn't exactly stink; it lies there like a big slice of ham. Its chief value today is as a reminder that great movies like the '41 "Falcon" don't just happen. On the 1-to-10 scale I rate it a 4, mainly for the camera work and the supporting players.