Cheap Time of Your Life (B&W) (Video) (H.C. Potter) Price

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Customer Reviews of Time of Your Life (B&W)

"Here's two dollars; go get me a map of the world and a good revolver."
Nick's Bar is a place where you can "come in and be yourself." <
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>The sign says so; and everyone does so. <
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>For Joe, being himself is drinking champaign all day while teaching Tom all the skills he'll need in life, defending Kitty Duvall's honor from a bullying policeman (some things never change!) and humoring an old cowboy with more stories than he can remember having told. <
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>"Did I ever tell you about the time I was married to a midget weighing thirty-nine pounds?" <
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>I've noticed that at least three other reviewers drew comparisons to the teevee show Cheers, which I found vacuous and shallow. Nick's is the bar that the cast of Cheers WISHES they were in. <
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>Remember the sign ["Come in and be yourself"]? <
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>In the final scene, Nick himself takes the sign out of the window and tears it up, saying, "Enough is enough!" reminiscent of BobGod's great stage play "Ronald Smith's Closet" used as an improvisational training tool at Ned Mandarino's School of Transpersonal Acting in the seventies and eighties.

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Long on Promise but Short on Delivery
I suspect many an aspiring writer has spent too much time in a bar looking for artistic inspiration. I get this inpression from all of the "dramas" that take place in taverns. Some, like "The Iceman Cometh", are topnotch. Others, like "The Time of Your Life", come across mediocre at best. In the case of the latter, I found myself wondering what the point was. We are expected to believe that interesting, intelligent people congregate for innocent fun and frolic. Maybe it does seem like a pleasant place to many but I found myself wondering why there were more employees than customers, why there was a full-time cook when I only saw one person eat while there, why the script was so lame. This was obviously a theatrical play brought to the screen. It may have worked better on stage the way the script moves the spotlight from one charater to another. However, on film I felt this gave the movie a lack of perspective. Most of the vignettes were pretty bland. The humor failed to make me smile, the drama failed to touch me and the suspense bored me. It seemed that there was always the potential to amuse, entertain, or intrigue but the script just wasn't up to the task. <
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>I made it a point to watch "The Time of Your Life" because I noted that James Cagny was the star. I like his acting style and ability (when given at least a reasonable vehicle to preform in). It actually was a sort of family affair with his brother William as the producer and his sister Jeanne as the leading lady. Cagny was decent enough but his role, as well, lacked substance. The movie was from a play by William Saroyan. Saroyan no doubt observed many interesting things from his experiences in taverns. Unfortunately, it appears that he must have been inebriated at the time; no sober writer would have thought that any of this was worth writing about.

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Come in and Be Yourself.
THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE was based upon William Saroyan's Pulitzer Prize-winning play and was brought about, in part, by a collaboration of the Cagney siblings (James, Jeanne, and William). Except for one brief shot of the Salvation Army singing outside the establishment, the entire movie takes place inside Nick's, a saloon, restaurant, and entertainment palace on the waterfront in San Francisco. James Cagney plays Joe, a man who has a lot of cash and spends his time observing, listening, and helping people and fulfilling his every whim. Wayne Morris plays Tom, Joe's gopher man; Jeanne Cagney plays Kitty, a former "burlesque queen" who falls for Tom; and William Bendix plays Nick. The floating characters at Nick's also include, among others, a lovesick young man, an out of work fellow, a drunk, a cowboy who calls himself "Kit Carson", a pinball wizard, a dancer who is a comedian that has no funny jokes, a police officer, and a couple of socialites.

There really isn't much plot in THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE. However, neither the movie nor the play it was based upon are about "plot". There may not seem to be a lot going on, but actually there is. The plot of the story is it's characters. Each person that comes into Nick's has a story and some of them we learn, some of them we don't. However, while listening to each person (just as Joe does) we learn something about them and in the process we discover things about ourselves. THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE is art in it's highest form because it entertains, yet also enlightens.

The quality of this DVD isn't all that bad, especially considering how inexpensive it is to purchase a copy (the Laserlight edition can be purchased for less than $5). The sound is good through most of the film except for the occasional scratch and the picture is great (the one scene where you can't read what is on the piece of paper was filmed that way intentionally because you are not supposed to see what's written on the paper because it's too small).

Overall a good movie well worth the time to watch it.