"Widow's Peak"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                               June 18, 1994

    There's a new film from Ireland that's going to open at the Tampa Theater
next weekend, but since I'll be away and can't review it next Saturday, I'm
doing it a week early. It's called "Widow's Peak" and it's hard to think of it
as anything other than the latest installment of Joan Plowright doing her
slightly eccentric widow's turn, the same one she's done now in two previous
films, "Enchanted April" and "The Summerhouse." To be fair to her, she does
not play exactly the same character in each of these films (she's too fine an
actor for that), but the similarities in the characters are great, so the
differences are pretty subtle.

   "Widow's Peak" refers to an area of a small Irish village in the 1920s
where only widows may live. This is no ghetto of poor old women with no place
else to go, but the ritziest neighborhood in town, and its exclusivity is
enforced by the richest and most elitist of the lot, Mrs. Doyle-Counighan
(Plowright). She and her ladyfriends have the power to control the mores of
this little town, not to mention who moves into their neighborhood. The only
woman they allow into their company who does not fit this mold is a poor
fiftyish spinster named Miss O'Hare (played by Mia Farrow) who lives in a tiny
little cottage and is wooed by the local dentist; the widows seem to tolerate
her as a kind of poor relation who is usually quiet and well-behaved. When
American Edwina Broome (Natasha Richardson), the thirtyish widow of a British
officer, decides to buy a house on Widow's Peak, she wins the seal of approval
from Mrs. Doyle-Counighan not just because she's a rich widow forced to move
from the South of France to a void golddigging suitors, but because she's
young and beautiful and would make a great match for Mrs. Doyle-Counighan's
rather silly bachelor son Adrian (Plowright tends to have silly bachelor sons
in these movies as well, viz. "The Summer House.") Oddly, though, Miss O'Hare
takes an instant dislike to her and seems to go out of her way to make
trouble.

   Having set the scene, that's all I want to do by way of plot summary
because, like so many other films these days (including "The Summer House" and
"The Crying Game") this film has a twisty plot and a surprise ending that
you'll want to enjoy for yourself if you go see it.

    The question is, should you go see it. Well, in comparison to most of the
other films out there in this period of the summer doldrums, I'd say probably
yes. It's clever, it's amusing, it's entertaining. From a feminist
perspective, it's not in the same class with "The Summer House" where the old
women had a lot of truth and wisdom to convey about life under patriarchy. In
this film, the old women are, by and large, the agents of patriarchy,
enforcing a rigid code of conventional morality and controlling people's lives
through their narrow-minded and stultifying precepts. While it's true that
they get their comeuppance in the end, this doesn't feel like a woman-loving
film. The screenwriter, Hugh Leonard, seems to take a fairly conventional
patriarchal view of all the women in the film, the controlling widows and the
ones who get the better of them. So, I guess I'd say, having seen it, that I
could give it a qualified recommendation. It's well-cast; the actors are good
(though you might not think so until after it's all over). The scenery is the
lovely Irish countryside. And it is, as I said, reasonably entertaining.
Still, if you want all that I'd recommend going to a video store and renting
"The Summer House"; it has the feminist moments that this one quite lacks.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.
   Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.