Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Film: B

 

 

One of writer/director Henry Jaglom’s early indie successes is his 1983 relationship study; Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?  Not a documentary or scientific study, it is a passive comedy about middle-aged adults trying to find fun and happiness in New York.  At its center is Zee, played by the ever-interesting Karen Black, who helps to make this Jaglom’s corollary to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1978), intended or not.

 

There is certainly less comedy, and more naturalism to the way the acting and camera works.  Outside of Allen’s trademark “neurotic cam” and befitting characters (no matter the cinematographer), there is neurosis in these characters, but it is of the comparatively more laid back variety.  In Eli (Jaglom regular Michael Emil), he may be more aggressive than most of the characters here, he has neurosis that he understands, knows quite well, and expresses many things in detail.  Along with Jaglom’s more streetwise approach to filming, the result is like a gritty drama without much of the drama.

 

Frances Fisher makes her feature film debut, showing even then how good she was and how much the camera liked her.  And then there is Orson Welles, who is in the opening logo for International Rainbow Pictures on many of Jaglom’s films and also does a hilarious bit as a guy who visits a zoo on a TV show the couple is watching.  Welles was not far away from his great Moonlighting episode, shot in black and white, of course.

 

Add some other good supporting actors and this is a solid piece of filmmaking that manages to be subtle, yet always smart and moves along well enough.  Such a film then was rare, and even less common now, such as Nancy Meyers’ less narrative but more comic Something’s Gotta Give (2003) or Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997).  These lives do not deserve to be relegated strictly to cable programming.

 

The full frame image is off of a serviceable analog transfer that is color consistent and in a print with minor damage, but the lighting is a shade or so darker than it should be, with daylight shots not looking daylight enough.  Cinematographer Robert Fiore finds a new approach to shooting the much-filmed city that does not immediately remind us of anything we have seen before, which likely looked even better in the film print’s original DuArt color processing.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is also passable, with Jaglom’s usually amusing use of music, whether on the soundtrack digetically (within the scene), non-digetically, or even sung by one of the actors.  He likes to leave background noise and distractions on the soundtrack, form the location recordings, but this is never a problem.  The few extras include a brief on-camera intro by Jaglom, brief filmographies, DVD-ROM weblinks, and a trailer gallery for this and four other Jaglom films.

 

The film gets funnier as it goes along and eventually earns its R rating, but it is smarter than what we would get today in lesser filmmaking hands.  As for the title’s meaning, you will have to figure it out for yourself, but there is a “title” song.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo