Joe's View

The movies that Paul Mazursky wrote and directed from 1969 to 1980 have held up as smart entertainment, but the passage of four decades has made them vital time capsules of an era that feels as far removed from today as the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Mazursky’s prime interest was in charting male-female relationships through a stormy period in which women seemed to become more mysterious to men as a result of the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism.

The filmmaker began the revolutionary era with “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969) which poked gentle fun at the thirtysomething Carol and Alice’s attempts to move out of the Doris Day era and share in some of the fun they saw the younger generation having.

By the end of the decade, Mazursky was siding with the female characters in his “An Unmarried Woman” (1978) about an Upper East Side wife and mother (played to perfection by Jill Clayburgh) who doesn’t blossom as an individual until after her husband dumps her for a younger woman.

In between those two milestones, Mazursky made the wonderful transitional comedy-drama, “Blume in Love” (1973). It will be my pleasure to introduce the film at tonight’s Martini & A Movie event at the Fairfield Theatre Company. After the screening, there will be a discussion with the Easton novelist and journalist Jessica Speart touching on the issues raised by the movie.

“Blume in Love” is about a Los Angeles divorce lawyer who doesn’t realize how much he loves his wife until after he is caught cheating on her and she leaves him.

George Segal plays the title role in one of several strong performances he gave in the wake of his Oscar-nominated work in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1966.

Segal could do drama and comedy with equal skill and he was always a wonderful partner for the actors who played opposite him — a skill he shared with another 1970s-defining star, Jeff Bridges.

In her first few films, Barbra Streisand showed a tendency to roll right over her co-stars, but she and Segal made a delightful comedy team in Streisand’s first non-musical film, “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1970).

The magical thing about Segal’s performance in “Blume in Love” is that he somehow manages to make us care about a guy who could be terribly unsympathetic if played by a less skillful actor.

Segal allows us to appreciate the lawyer’s struggle to change himself in the changing times he is living through — the character comes to love his wife even more after he sees her starting to lead an independent life.

Blume cannot blame his wife, Nina (Susan Anspach), for her new relationship with the laid-back musician Elmo Cole, who becomes an emblem of the era as played with great charm by then-acting-neophyte Kris Kristofferson. One of Blume’s problems in winning his wife back is his affection for her new beau.

“Blume in Love” is also a reminder of the refreshing sexual frankness of the Hollywood studio films made during the 1970s. Marsha Mason gives a memorable supporting performance as a friend of Blume’s who becomes his lover and her scenes feature casual nudity that would be turned into a very big deal if a major actress did the same thing today. (One of the elements that surprises new viewers of “An Unmarried Woman” is the low-key nature of Jill Clayburgh’s nudity in a few bedroom scenes.)

So much has changed over the past 36 years — regarding both relationships and movies — that the conversation after tonight’s screening should be interesting.

(The doors will open for tonight’s free screening at 7 p.m. The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. For more information, go online to www.fairfieldtheatre.org.)

Melanie Angelina Maras has made a strong stage debut with her new comedy-drama, “Kiss Me on the Mouth,” which Inviolet Repertory Theatre is presenting at Center Stage through Nov. 21.

Maras takes a clear-eyed look at two female friends — Christina (Aubyn Philabaum, above) and Amy (Megan Hart, below) — with very different ideas about sex and love.

Because Maras examines the sex lives of these well-heeled Manhattan women some people might describe her play as another “Sex & The City” spin-off — or the stage equivalent of a “chick lit” novel — but that would be a facile view of a darker and tougher comedy about the search for Mr. Right in the new century.

We meet Christina and Amy in a Catholic Church where Amy is seriously contemplating a life as a nun. She’s tired of the relationship rat race and wants to devote her time and energy to something more worthwhile.

Christina — who is a wealthy party girl-type — is appalled by her best friend’s plan and asks Amy to give herself a little more time to find a guy worth building a future around.

The women attend an art opening, where there are sparks between Christina and the painter, Gabriel (Ken Matthews, above). Amy becomes the target of an Italian guy named Andre (Troy Lococo, below) who gives her a hard sell, presenting himself as having fallen in love at first sight.

Amy resists Andre — for a while — but then gives in to his love-is-everything routine. Christina also finds herself getting in deeper with Gabriel, even though he lives in squalor in Crown Heights and is apparently agoraphobic.

“Kiss Me on the Mouth” establishes four distinct individuals very quickly and then shows us the painful fallout when one person in a relationship becomes delusional about the real feelings of the other person (in this regard, the play is actually more like last summer’s witty and wise mismatched couple comedy “(500) Days of Summer” than “SATC”).

Director Stephen Adly Guirgis (a major downtown theater force through his work with LAByrinth Theater Company) guides the quartet of actors to very daring and very appealing performances.

Our feelings for the characters keep shifting in a lifelike manner — they seem smart one minute, incredibly dumb the next, just like those we know and care about in our lives.

The women especially keep surprising us.

Just when we’ve given up on Christina because of her seemingly thoughtless hedonism, she starts talking about how much she enjoyed staying at Amy’s house when she was a teen. Suddenly, a whole new door into the woman’s personality opens for us.

Amy gets a why-aren’t-you-calling-me-back aria of unanswered voice mail messages to Andre that is quite stunning for a woman who was thinking of becoming a nun a few weeks earlier.

“Kiss Me on the Mouth” is a mix of smart writing and tip-top acting presented in a tiny space that allows us to experience every small nuance in the story.

(Tickets for “Kiss Me on the Mouth” are $18 and may be ordered at www.InVioletRep.com.)

The new Sandra Brown novel, “Rainwater” (Simon and Schuster), is surprising on multiple levels.

Brown is one of our finest thriller writers, and like many of her peers, she has been on a one-book-a-year schedule for some time.

In August, the author delivered one of her best crime novels yet, the movie-themed, unputdownable “Smash Cut.”

So, what’s with a second Sandra Brown novel only three months after the last one?

And, why does the dust jacket look more appropriate for a Depression era Horton Foote story than one of Brown’s patented sexy page turners?

Well, therein lies a good story in itself.

“Rainwater” is a rural Texas Depression era novel — unlike anything else with Brown’s name on it — that the writer has been working on in secret for the past few years, in between her other books.

“None of my business associates knew that I was writing it until it was finished,” Brown notes on the acknowledgements page. “Because it is so different from what I’ve been writing for the past twenty years, I submitted it with a great deal of trepidation, unsure how it would be received.”

Although “Rainwater” does mark a major departure for Brown in terms of style and subject matter, I can’t imagine that the gripping and moving story will disappoint any of the novelist’s fans — and it should introduce the writer to a whole new audience.

Boarding house operator Ella Barron is a wonderful character and through this single mother, struggling to raise a son with learning disabilities in the Depression, we are taken back to a time of great struggle and great determination in this country.

Ella’s routine changes when the local doctor asks her to take in a friend of his as a temporary boarder — the title character David Rainwater.

It turns out that Mr. Rainwater is dying and wants to maintain a semblance of a normal life until he has to be hospitalized.

Brown draws us in to the life in the boarding house — and the small Texas hamlet — with the same narrative ease that she displays in her thrillers.

 Although Ella fears her son Solly is doomed to be institutionalized, we know from a brief prologue that the boy lived to a ripe old age on his own — in the present day, he runs an antique store.

“Rainwater” shows us the crushing poverty people faced in 1934. There is a “shantytown” near the small Texas town and some of the haves treat the have-nots with contempt rather than compassion. Mr. Rainwater and Ella are drawn into the terrible repercussions of a federal government plan to pay farmers to dispose of their starving cattle — when poor folks try to salvage some of the meat before the cattle are buried in pits, people involved in the meat business move in to crush the plan.

Brown’s novel takes place more than 70 years ago, but few readers will be able to escape the parallels between then and now (I just heard on the radio this morning that more than 10 percent of the population is out of work now).

“Rainwater” is a story of hope without sentimentality — and people managing to help each other in very hard times — that deserves to find a large readership no matter which section of a bookstore it might end up in.

To do a good coming-of-age movie you need a very talented young performer who can convincingly mature right in front of our eyes.

Carey Mulligan does that — and more — in “An Education,” the new Nick Hornby-scripted comedy-drama set in London and Paris in the early 1960s.

Jenny is a smart and funny 16-year-old determined to get into Oxford until she falls for an older guy, David (Peter Sarsgaard), who shows her how much fun she has been missing while focused on her studies.

A few reviewers have compared Mulligan to the young Audrey Hepburn but she seems stronger and more centered than Hepburn was in her early ingenue roles (it was a little creepy to watch the actress being lusted after by Humphrey Bogart in “Sabrina” and Gary Cooper in “Love in the Afternoon” because they looked like old leches taking advantage of a naive girl).

Jenny is much more in charge than any of the early Hepburn characters. In some ways she seems wiser than David and we sense early on that he won’t be able to fool her into doing something she doesn’t want to do.

The relationship with David turns into a side issue as “An Education” progresses. The real story here is the tough position young British women were in just before all Hell broke loose with the “Swinging London” era — a little later in the 1960s — and then the feminist revolution of the early 1970s.

There is a terrible moment in “An Education” when Jenny questions the value of higher education with her most dedicated teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams). Why bother working so hard to get into Oxford when her employment opportunities will be so limited after she graduates?, Jenny asks the teacher. Why not just enjoy being taken care of by a man with a few bucks in his pocket who loves fine dining, classical music and jazz?

The movie’s title is terrific because Hornby (working from a memoir by Lynn Barber) and director Lone Scherfig make us examine what really does constitute “An Education.”

Mulligan takes us through each step of Jenny’s education from devoted student to enthusiastic hedonist to a young woman who knows she can’t depend on other people for the things she needs to learn. You should be seeing this marvelous 24-year-old actress in many films over the next few years.

(“An Education” opens Friday at the Avon Theatre, Stamford; the Garden Cinemas, Norwalk: and Bow Tie Criterion, New Haven.)

Did you know that the world premiere of “The Sound of Music” took place at the Shubert Theater in New Haven 50 years ago this fall?

I didn’t know that either, until the new Sony Masterworks 50th anniversary CD of the original cast recording landed on my desk recently.

In addition to three excellent bonus tracks, the CD includes unusually interesting liner notes tracing the history of the show, along with never-before-published pictures shot during the cast album recording session.

“The Sound of Music” opened on Broadway Nov. 16, 1959, but had its first pre-Broadway try-out run in New Haven a month earlier. The musical was an instant hit, but composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II wrote one of the show’s signature tunes on the road (so, New Haven audiences didn’t get to hear “Edelweiss”).

The days of out-of-town try-outs are basically gone now. Every once in a while, a high-profile show such as “The Producers” or “Hairspray” gets a preliminary run in Chicago or Seattle, but due to rising production costs it is just too expensive to do the three or four city shakedown tour that was common practice up until the 1980s.

Rodgers and Hammerstein tried out most of their shows in New Haven. A decade before “The Sound of Music,” that show’s star, Mary Martin, gave her first performances in “South Pacific” at the Shubert.

“The Sound of Music” has been dismissed for years as inferior Rodgers and Hammerstein, but as I listened to this reissue over the past couple of days, I was impressed all over again by the unending procession of popular tunes from the title song to “My Favorite Things” to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” Would that a show open on Broadway in 2009 with so many memorable songs!

The peerless Broadway historian and critic Ethan Mordden addresses the dissing of “The Sound of Music” in his book about the musicals of the 1950s, “Coming Up Roses”:

“No hit musical before the pop-opera era is more vilified by those who dislike it, as sophisticates shiver at the concept of ‘a lark who is learning to pray,’ at the buoyant nuns and growling Nazis and all those kids.”

“However, the ‘lark’ line, not to mention those utterly inconsequential items that the heroine addresses in ‘My Favorite Things’ (‘whiskers on kittens,’ “warm woolen mittens,’ even ‘doorbells’), bears witness to the way Hammerstein could get into a character’s head. He wasn’t writing lyrics for a sophisticate, but for a teenaged girl of extremely narrow cultural background, almost a simpleton, and a highly religious one at that.”

The CD liner notes point out that “The Sound of Music” was not instigated by Rodgers and Hammerstein but by their friend and “South Pacific” collaborator Mary Martin who saw a film about the Trapp Family Singers and immediately wanted to do a stage show about them. Orginally, Martin thought the score could be made up of vintage Austrian songs, with a few contributions from her friends, but the Broadway songwriting duo wasn’t interested in piece work and insisted on doing the whole score.

From a purely financial standpoint, it was a very wise decision. “Though it did not enjoy the longest original run of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show, it was their biggest hit in the long view of it, counting domestic and world-wide stagings, recording and sheet music sales, and, mainly, The Movie,” Mordden writes of the enormous ancillary profits from the musical that included the blockbuster 1965 movie version.

The global reach of “The Sound of Music” is illustrated in two of the bonus tracks on the CD, beautiful versions of “Edelweiss” and “Suk Dig Till Bergen (Climb Ev’ry Mountain)” from German and Swedish productions of the show. The third track is an amusing — and very ironic — spoof of the show done at Carnegie Hall in 1959 by Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews (the latter of course would score the biggest hit of her career in the movie version of the show she had satirized so mercilessly six years earlier).

This new cast album is a must for any Broadway musical fan.

In France last year, the film was called “Cliente.” Here, the movie is being released this week with the rather flat and generic title “A French Gigolo.”

But, whatever you call it, Josiane Balasko’s film about a middle-aged woman who hires male escorts is the sort of wise and frank look at sex that would be almost inconceivable in a Hollywood film.

The great Nathalie Baye stars as Judith, a well-heeled 51-year-old woman who hosts a popular show on a QVC-like French home shopping channel. Tired of the time and effort it takes to find suitable bed partners — she’s really only looking for fun from men — Judith starts using the Internet to line up escorts.

Although it appears that the TV host has hired a number of different escorts in the months before “A French Gigolo” begins, Marco (Eric Caravaca) is her favorite. He’s darkly handsome, sweetly affectionate and completely reliable.

Balasko could have made a good movie entirely from Judith’s point of view — her dilemma is one shared by people all over the world — but what makes the picture really special is that Marco gets almost equal screen time. We see that he is married and uses most of his earnings to finance his wife’s beauty salon. Fanny (Isabelle Carre) thinks Marco is earning the money through extra construction work.

“A French Gigolo” is as much about money as it is about sex. Marco has found what he thinks is a painless way to earn good extra dough and Judith thinks she has simplified her life by paying for sex without romantic attachments.

Balasko gives the movie a fascinating journalistic element by showing us how the sex trade works in the age of the Internet. Websites offering a menu of handsome men available by the hour. Clients scheduling appointments with the ease of setting up an hour with a hair stylist or psychologist.

Of course, escorting and hiring escorts can have complications.

Fanny finds out about her husband’s sideline and is at first appalled. Faced with the loss of her own business, however, she convinces herself to believe Marco’s assurances that what he does is simply “work” that in no way compromises his love for his wife.

Judith finds herself becoming interested in Marco as a person as well as a sex object and Marco starts to wonder if he might be better off with a permanent arrangement with the older woman.

“A French Gigolo” is refreshingly adult and direct. It doesn’t judge Judith and Marco but it doesn’t avoid showing us their obvious delusions about being able to make such a neat split between their sex lives and their love lives.

Baye is one of the finest actresses working in movies today. Four years ago, she gave a staggering performance as an alcoholic Paris police detective in “Le Petit Lieutenant” (if you haven’t seen the movie, put it on your Netflix list immediately!). “A French Gigolo” is a lighter piece of material, but Baye digs into the role of Judith with her usual precision and warmth.

“A French Gigolo” will be available for home cable viewing from IFC On Demand starting tomorrow.

Two of my favorite practitioners of the traditional mystery — Carolyn Hart and Katherine Hall Page — share a publisher (William Morrow) and this year they’ve shared a publication date and theme as well.

Last Tuesday marked the release of Christmas whodunits by each author, Hart’s “Merry, Merry Ghost” and Page’s “The Body in the Sleigh.”

The hardcover books are slightly smaller than usual which means they have been nicely priced at $15.99 (retail).

But enough with book business talk!

The good news here is that Hart and Page have produced wonderfully tricky and satisfying mysteries that happen to be set during the holiday season.

You could call both authors heirs to Agatha Christie because of the way they mix airtight plotting with wonderful characterizations.

Like Christie, they have been able to use the whodunit format to explore human psychology and contemporary social issues as well as to provide the escapist entertainment we expect from the genre.

“Merry, Merry Ghost” is the second book in a new series Hart launched last year with “Ghost at Work,” about a crime solver named Bailey Ruth Raeburn, who happens to be deceased.

Hart has built a large fan base for her “Death on Demand” mysteries featuring the proprietress of a mystery bookstore on an island off the coast of South Carolina. The author branched out with a terrific second series that follows a brilliant and good-hearted retired journalist known as Henrie O.

The Bailey Ruth stories are what you might call experimental crime fiction, allowing Hart to add charming supernatural elements to the ace plotting and social observation we have come to expect from her.

Bailey Ruth lived and died in the town of Adelaide, Oklahoma, and thanks to the heavenly Department of Good Intentions, she has been back twice (so far) to protect townspeople facing serious dangers. In both cases, she has had to solve murders in order to do her duty.

What is so delightful (and unexpected) about the new Hart series is the way she blends a nuts-and-bolts view of what we might face in Heaven with the same clever and compelling mysteries the writer has delivered in her earthly books. What might sound rather twee — as the Brits would say — becomes a fully satisfying mix of mystery and fantasy.

Katherine Hall Page has stuck to one series for 18 books with no signs yet of diminishing returns. Her sleuth, Faith Fairchild, is a Massachusetts caterer, married to a minister, who has found herself solving crime after crime without ever falling into the Jessica Fletcher amateur crimesolver trap (i.e. so many people around her are murdered that you might start fearing she is the slyest of serial killers).

Page has managed to shake things up by moving the stories from Faith’s hometown of Aleford to the family’s Sanpere Island summer cottage off the coast of Maine. Faith is a native Manhattanite whose life in the big bad city has already powered one novel in the series (“The Body in the Big Apple”).

Like Hart, Page takes crime seriously. Murder is always more than a mere plot mechanism in her stories — the loss and the fear are felt.

“The Body in the Sleigh” finds Faith adjusting to her first Christmas on Sanpere Island. Husband Tom has had a health scare, so the doctor has forbidden him from taking on his usual holiday season work chores. Faith is the daughter of a minister, too, so as the book starts she is secretly enjoying her first Christmas with no responsibilities to a church’s congregation.

Of course, Faith’s anticipation of a relaxing holiday ends when she discovers the victim of an apparent drug overdose in a municipal holiday display. In another, remote part of the island, a slightly eccentric single woman who raises goats has a baby left on her doorstep.

We know that these two events have to be related, but Page still has several surprises up her sleeve as well as a compelling subplot about the toll the drug trade is taking on rural Maine. The author’s ability to empathize with all sorts of characters in her books might reach a new peak in “Sleigh” during a long section in which we follow a male high school friend of the dead girl as he recalls their relationship.

Christmas certainly plays a major role in both of these novels — which will make them more fun to read during the next two months — but they are fine mysteries that could be enjoyed any time of the year.