| Early Kay Lenz, looking fit |
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| written by MKaliher |
June 11, 2009 - 1:46 AM PDT |
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1 out of 1 members found this review helpful
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After catching this period piece on Hulu's small screen, I simply had to rent it. I hadn't been aware of Kay Lenz until I saw her in The Great Scout & Cat House Thursday, in which she was both funny and gorgeous, holding her own with Lee Marvin and Robert Culp. Great Scout, by the way, is going for around $50 on DVD now; could someone in Hollyweird please reissue it so us po' folk can afford it? Anyway, Breezy captures the cheesiness of the early 70s in all its glory--the tacky clothing, bad haircuts, and pseudo-hippie lingo. (The hippie culture flowered between about 1963-1966. Hollywood and the media found out about it around 1967, and immediately saw an opportunity for lucre--Hey, everyone was curious about the stoned, free-loving kids; why not exploit it?--and morphed the culture into a caricature of itself, cranking out flicks like The Trip and Easy Rider and TV shows like Laugh-In, which were largely responsible for polyester bell-bottom pants and the similarly tasteless, weird zeitgeist of the 70s.)
But Breezy displays the formidable acting chops of 19-year-old ingénue Lenz in counterpoint to those of 54-year-old veteran William Holden in this May/September romance, an early Clint Eastwood film. Their sturdy performances make the story convincing--however improbable--and I found myself buying into the idea of a homeless Laurel Canyon pseudo-hippie hooking up with a cynical old L.A. real estate agent. Yet I still think that slow, sublimely suggestive shot of Kay's leg in The Great Scout & Cat House Thursday is sexier than her frank nude footage in Breezy: the magic of good film editing, I guess. It's a shame Kay Lenz can't be found in more films. She's far more talented than most of the younger actors working today, pretty enough to be mistaken for Emmylou Harris's sister. And she can master far more complex roles than those offered on TV. |
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