Stella/Heart Condition/Men Don't Leave/Flashback/Cinema Paradiso

Roger Ebert - Host: Now, it would be easy to sneer at "Stella", I suppose, and adopt the attitude that this is a cornball, predictable melodrama. But movie material is only as good or as bad as the style in which it's realized, and "Stella" is a movie with a lot of style, warmth, and heart. It has a quality a lot of more sophisticated films lack, which is that it makes us really care about the characters. The Bette Midler performance, out on a limb and full of energy, is what really carries things along, but Trini Alvarado is wonderful too, and all of the performances in the movie find the right tone to engage us emotionally. This movie was inspired by the 1937 Barbara Stanwyck classic "Stella Dallas", and the film historian Leslie Halliwell said of that movie that "audiences came to sneer and stayed to weep." The same thing may happen this time.

Gene Siskel - Host: I came to, uh, weep, and sneered. Uh, I, we have a WILDLY big difference of opinion on this picture. I really was unhappy watching all this, I was almost embarrassed for the people in the picture. Uh, I didn't buy a single character. They all seemed contemporary. Bette Midler seemed very contemporary. Trini Alvarado, in particular, seemed like a high energy attractive woman of the late '80s/early '90s, and in this picture, it's all photographed and stylized as some kind of '50s or '40s melodrama, and I didn't think it worked. I never believed Stephen Collins would be the least interested in Bette Midler. I don't understand why they got married in the first place...

Roger Ebert - Host: They DIDN'T get married.

Gene Siskel - Host: I, I mean, why they had the relationship in the first place. It, none of it worked.

Roger Ebert - Host: Well, to some degree, Gene, I think you have to be a little bit forthcoming when you come to a movie like this. This IS a tearjerker, weepy melodrama. That's what it is.

Gene Siskel - Host: I WANTED it to be that!

Roger Ebert - Host: That's what it's intended to be. The people in it are very likable, the situation is not believable, it's not supposed to be believable. It's supposed to be manipulative. Either you're going to go with it and allow it to have this effect on you, or not. Now, I loved these people. I thought Midler's performance had so much, it had a flair to it. I mean, the timing, the way she carried herself, the way she talked.

Gene Siskel - Host: She seems like she's role-playing some xerox fale- pale xerox copy of Stella Dallas, the old '40s heroine who's gonna be plucky and survive.

Roger Ebert - Host: I don't know...

Gene Siskel - Host: I laughed at the movie!

Roger Ebert - Host: One thing I do not to, ever, so I'm gonna break my own rule and do it right now is, I never review the audience.

Gene Siskel - Host: Right.

Roger Ebert - Host: I'm gonna tell you, when I saw this movie at a sneak preview, everybody in the theater was blowing their noses, honking...

Gene Siskel - Host: Well there's a lot of flu going around.

Roger Ebert - Host: Holding hands.

Gene Siskel - Host: Lot of flu going around.

Roger Ebert - Host: Oh Gene, now come on. People were really emotionally...

Gene Siskel - Host: I'm not gonna retreat into the audience. I laughed at the picture. And I heard some echoes.

Roger Ebert - Host: Well, I had a good time, and you caught flu.