Sweet Liberty

Alan Alda's follow-up to the hit comedy The Four Seasons, Sweet Liberty is an intermittently successful and lighthearted comedy that imagined what would happen if the past and present collided via Hollywood. It also provided a blueprint for David Mamet's State & Main, which took a similar premise and satirically ran amok with it. A local history professor who writes a surprise bestseller about the Revolutionary War, Alda is a man contending with a fairly mundane life until a Hollywood film crew shows up in his hometown to turn his book into a movie--one that's filled with loads of sex and violence, unlike the scholarly tome it's based on. And the drama that's being filmed soon spills over to real-life, as Alda falls in love with the actress playing his book's heroine, and his fiancée (Lise Hilboldt) becomes enamored of the movie's leading man. Alda and Hilboldt may be the film's central couple, but it's the movie stars they're fascinated with who will catch your eye: Michael Caine, right before he embarked on his career renaissance, and a young Michelle Pfeiffer, who for the first time got to show off her beguiling comic side. As the lothario leading man with eyes for any woman who crosses his path, Caine is the kind of charming cad you can never really hate for too long. And Pfeiffer, who gets the benefit of playing both the innocent maiden of the movie-within-the-movie and her neurotic, real-life counterpart, neatly tucks the movie into her bodice and saunters off with it. --Mark Englehart