Sweet Liberty

It was not too much of a strain for Alan Alda to do Sweet Liberty as his character of Hawkeye Pierce from MASH stepped right from the small screen to the big. Imagine Hawkeye as an American history professor writing a book on the southern theater of the American Revolution and you've got a start to Sweet Liberty.

Alda has not only written a book, but it was so good that he got some big bucks from Hollywood for the screen rights. And the company is going to film on location in North Carolina where Alda teaches history at a college and where he participates in the annual recreation of the Battle of Cowpens. But one read of what the Hollywood writers have done to his work and he's ready to sue.

Well that's not going to work because they've got the contract and the lawyers to back them up. How to salvage his work, for that he turns to screenwriter Bob Hoskins to help him navigate the ways of the movie business jungle. Hoskins too would like to see his name on something worthwhile and maybe Academy Award winning.

This involves Alda wooing in a different way stars of the film Michael Caine and Michelle Pheiffer. Caine is quite a wooer himself and the best performance from the supporting cast is that of Lois Chiles who plays Caine's wife who's decided he's been on too long a leash.

But in the scenes he's in Bob Hoskins truly steals Sweet Liberty. He's the quintessential Hollywood man who drags Alan Alda along through the highways and byways of movie speak. Saul Rubinek is also good as a most harassed and egotistical director.

I would like to have seen more of Lillian Gish playing Alda's dotty mother who wants to hook up with a bricklayer she had a LONG ago fling with. It's that way with Alzheimer's patients they remember something from ages ago, but not what they had for dinner yesterday. All I can say was the sex must have been fabulous.

Sweet Liberty is nice sparkling comedy about the business of making movies.