Cheap Till There Was You (Video) (John Seale) Price

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Customer Reviews of Till There Was You

A Colorful and Fun Throwback
This is the kind of film you use to see a lot in the 40's. It's a great movie for a weekend afternoon with a big sub and a bigger coke. Director John Seales made this old-fashioned action adventure. Mark Harmon is pitch perfect and Deborah Unger is about as gorgeous as the island of Vanuatu where this was filmed. It is beautifully photographed and nicely acted and if you can suspend belief for an hour and a half extremely enjoyable. Even the song Seales chose to frame the film around recalls the 40's and the terrific Kate Ceberano gets to sing it near the end.

Frank Flynn (Mark Harmon) is tending bar at "The Blue Nile" in New York on it's last night before closing. He gets to play sax by request on it's last night and does a pretty nice "'Till there was You". It's one of those old jazz clubs everyone has affection for and hates to see die and when Flynn receives a three month old letter from his brother Charlie saying to come to Vanuatu because he's finally struck it big, he heads off to the island as he has nothing else to do anyway.

The island is exotic and stunning but the news is bad as Charlie is dead and no one knows why. The Chief of Police on the island appears to want Frank to go home and stop asking around about Charlie. But when Frank meets the wife of the island's worst bad guy he smells something rotten. Jerome Krabbe is convincing as the off kilter Viv, who isn't about to let his gorgeous wife Anna (Unger) leave him.

Of course she and Frank hit it off and when their plane crashes on Pentecost Island she tells him some, but not all, of what his brother Charlie was up to. It all revolves around the legend of Betty Blue, a plane supposedly filled with Japanese gold during WWII that was lost. This might explain why these little gold bars keep popping up. But Frank is fixing to learn a lot more about his brother Charlie he didn't know.

When the natives of the island bring them deeper into the jungle he discovers Charle was a member of the tribe and had a native wife and two small boys, Charlie and Frank Jr. There are some pretty amusing moments as Frank has to go through some 'rituals' to become a member of the tribe himself, which comes in handy when he finds the sunken plane and Viv finds his wife and forces her back. It all leads to a showdown between everyone involved and the real truth about Charlie's death comes out.

This is well done and atmospheric fun with a nice camera and good performances from Harmon and Unger in likable roles. It's easy to look at and fun to watch. It's a guilty pleasure to pop in and relax with. You can always clean up the yard later! You'll love the ending as things wrap up in New York at the new "Blue Nile", Frank Flynn's Blue Nile, that is. Kate Ceberano does a great job singing "'Till there was You" over the terrific ending.

I'm not sure why this film isn't more well known but you'll have a good time watching it. Have fun....

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a mystery worth dying for
John Seale was camera operator on seminal Australian films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli, and DOP on Careful He Might Hear You, The Mosquito Coast, Rain Man and Gorillas in the Mist. This pedigree perhaps makes the disappointment of his directorial debut all the worse. He would manage to restore his reputation as DOP on Lorenzo's Oil, The Firm, The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. A mire of thriller, romantic triangle and jungle adventure genre conventions, Seale's film is only memorable for the glimpses of the Ava Gardner sloe-eyed beauty of Deborah Unger (later realised in Whispers in the Dark, and Crash), and his anthropological observation of the Bunlap tribe of Pentecost Island, Vanuatu where the film was shot. The plot concerns Mark Harmon as a New York barman come saxophonist who visits Vanuatu to see his brother, now believed murdered because of his association with Jeroen Krabbe and his wife Unger. The screenplay by Michael Thomas never decides what it wants to be, which subsequently means we don't care about the fate of Harmon's unseen brother, though going on how the locals have deified him, we can be sure he'd be unbearably pious. Thomas delivers a stale plot about Krabbe being a colonial white supremacist, and Seale doesn't help by reducing the natives to giggling exotics, or copycat Americans with their own bar and a bouncer wearing a t-shirt labeled "local boy". The only interesting point is the legend of the Betty Blonde, an American WW2 bomber which disappeared over the Islands and believed to be carrying captured Japanese gold (though how the Japanese gold was captured is not explained), and the discovery of a sunken underwater treasure with the likeness of Unger painted on it. Seale uses music appallingly, provides an ominous game of poker with Unger playing the title song on piano in the background, and people conveniently wear all white for night chases in blue light. However things pick up a little when Harmon and Unger are lost in the jungle and find a native camp, though soon Krabbe and his henchmen are in pursuit. Seale has one good edit, a cut from Krabbe kissing Unger in public to a private slap, and he effectively creates tension for the climactic confrontation, however exhaution and miscasting undermine our sympathies. Harmon is the kind of bland TV pretty boy like Don Johnson and Corbin Bernsen, who has some skill but no screen empathy, so that no matter how terrible Krabbe's actions and how poorly Seale protects him from acting humiliation, his comparative magnetism sways our allegiance to him. Seale even employs the wonderful Kate Ceberano to perform the title song at the conclusion then cuts away from her after one verse!