Year of the Comet [DVD]

 

 

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Sir Mason Harwood (Ian Richardson) runs an auction. He sends his daughter Margaret Harwood (Penelope Ann Miller) to a Scottish estate to take inventory for a potential auction. There she discovers an extremely large and rare bottle of wine that was bottled during the year in which Halley's Comet was discovered (1811.) She informs her father of the find.

Not entirely trusting his daughter with the retrieval Sir Mason sends help, Oliver Plexico (Timothy Daly) that also has a different interest in the bottle. Friendly rivalry on this retrieval mission leads to romance.

But wait another pursuer of the bottle, Philippe (Louis Jourdan) appears on the scene. He wants the bottle for nefarious purposes and Margaret is in the way.

Will she come to harm?
Will Oliver rescue her from certain peril, or grab the bottle?

Watching this can be lots of fun for the whole family as you find yourself saying "don't do that"

"They were your friends!" cries Maggie Harwood when she walks in on the pistol-holding, aged but well preserved Philippe. Lying on the rug behind him are his two, now dead, associates. "Well,' says Philippe, "we weren't that close."

Maggie (Penelope Ann Miller) is the heroine in this romantic comedy thriller. While the hero is the overly handsome, strong-jawed and mustachioed Oliver Plexico (Tim Daly), the real sex appeal comes from Philippe as played by 73-year-old Louis Jourdan. This was his last film. While many may remember him as the dashing and love-struck Gaston Lachaille in Gigi, he remains more fondly in my heart as Dr. Arcane in Swamp Thing. Like Dr. Arcane, Philippe is an incorrigibly well-mannered, egocentric and murderous creep. I suspect there are few actors as good as Jourdan who would be willing to semi-sing, while smacking his lips, leering and snapping his fingers, "There are chicks just ripe for some kissin'
And I mean to kiss me a few!
Then those chicks don't know what they're missin'
I got a lot of livin' to do!"

Jourdan does it. It's grotesquely funny.

The Year of the Comet is all about wine, and especially about an extraordinarily rare bottle of wine, an 1811 Lafite, that was once part of Bonaparte's cellar. In auction it could bring at least a million dollars. Maggie, who works for her father, the wine merchant Sir Mason Harwood (Ian Richardson), is sent to Scotland to appraise an extensive wine collection that Harwood and Company may be commissioned to place in auction. Maggie, who knows almost as much about wine as her father, may be "a funny, over-worked ragamuffin" but she got the assignment from her father by telling him he either gives her this chance to show just how good she is or she's quitting. Now she's knocking on the great oaken door of an isolated Scottish castle to appraise the wine. Unknown to Maggie, she's interrupting the torture of the owner by Philippe and his men. Philippe assures his victim that shoving the hypodermic needle with a certain drug right in the eyeball won't interfere with the man's vision...although it will cause exquisite pain later with each blink. All that we know is that there is a formula Philippe is determined to have. Maggie is taken to the cellar and this is when, brushing off centuries of cobwebs and grime while she looks at these hundreds of encrusted wine bottles, she makes her discovery...the 1811 Lafite. And it's just a short while later that Maggie makes more discoveries. First, she finds Oliver looking for her, the man who prefers beer and calls wine a beverage. She met him at a wine tasting at Harwoods. She and Oliver discover the body of the owner in the wine cellar and they discover Philippe and his crew absconding with the bottle of Lafite.

The chase is on! Sometimes Maggie and Oliver chase Philippe. Sometimes he's chasing them. They chase around with cars, motorbikes, helicopters, airplanes and rowboats. They chase scenically through the cold, rocky mountains of Scotland and the warm slopes of the French Rivera. Maggie and Oliver bicker, kiss, bicker, fall in love and bicker. And then they wind up having to listen to Philippe sing "Gotta lotta livin' to do." By now we've realized (this is no spoiler) that this adventure has as much to do with the secret formula and glands as it has to do with wine.

Year of the Comet strains to be a Hitchcock romantic thriller. While it doesn't come close it's an engaging, undemanding romp. The script is by William Goldman, a man who knows what he's doing with this sort of thing. Try Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Princess Bride. He works wonders with the clichés he deliberately uses. The direction, however, is a letdown. It's clunky and never let's the script build much steam, either in the chases or in the romance department. I don't know what happened to Peter Yates, but the director of Bullitt, Breaking Away and Eyewitness just doesn't seem engaged. Miller and Daly are attractive enough, although Daly is better at being handsome than at being an amusing speaker of clever lines. Cary Grant needn't worry. The real pleasures of the movie, other than the plot, are Louis Jourdan (now nearly 90 and living in France) and Ian Richardson, such a sly actor. Ian McNeice as one of Philippe's men holds his own.

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