1988 - MR NORTH, sort of comedy of manners way to refined for it's own good.

Mr. North is the last film that John Huston has a credit on.  Huston worked on the screenplay and was supposed to play one of the characters in the film but his poor health finally caught up with him and Robert Mitchum stepped in as a substitute.  

Mr. North is based on a book by Thornton Wilder who is mostly remembered for his play Our Town.  The film tells the story of a young man named Theophilus North and his interactions with the elite of Newport, Rhode Island in 1926.  Robert Mitchum is a dying millionaire with a bladder problem, Mary Stuart Masterson is a young woman with severe migraine head aches who North cures. Virginia Madsen is an Irish maid in love with an upper class man etc.  North moves from one subplot to another as a little mister fixer upper.

For a film with three talented writers, the dialog is very stiff and unnatural.  The actors aren't able to breathe much life into their characters. Faced with streams of prose the characters all sound like something out of a poor man's version of Masterpiece Theater. 

 

Frankly I don't think anyone with a straight face could say this is one of Thornton Wilder's better story efforts.  The plot what there is of it seems more like the uncollected fantasies of an old man than an actual novel with a beginning, middle and end.

This was kind of a Huston family reunion film. Danny Huston, Angelica Huston and Allegra Huston were all John Huston's children.  Virginia Madsen was Danny Huston's wife.  Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum were close friends of John Huston.  But all this buddy buddy actor stuff unfortunately didn't really make Mr. North much of a film.

Written by John Huston, Janet Roach and James Costigan.  The running time is 93 minutes.