THE LADY AND THE HIGHWAYMAN (1989) *1/2 No matter what era they're placed in, there's apparently just not going to be much legitimate swashbuckling in a Barbara Cartland novel. In fact, there's not much of anything. The thing that there's least of, interestingly enough, is relationships between women. Lysette Anthony gets her big break in society when she's named a bedchamber lady (or something like that) to the queen, but the queen barely even makes it into three frames. No, what Cartland enthusiasts (contradiction in terms alert) like to focus on is the relationship between men and a totem for themselves. Emma Samms spends some time thinking about Lysette, but it can all be boiled down to a single word: jealousy. So, maybe they're all jealous of other women, which is understandable enough if they're so simple as to find solace in this stuff. Or maybe their entire goal in life is that some other female should be jealous of them, that's probably more like it. Hugh Grant (in a refugee from the Duran Duran fan club hairdo) is projected as the tough, dangerous guy, which should give you some sense of the sort of imaginations that we're working with. The entire political intrigue of the Charles II era is disposed of in two lines of narrative, leaving lots and lots and lots of room for dialogue so inane as to be indescribable, or perhaps more accurately, unworthy of description. Suffice to say that even Michael York and Oliver Reed are rarely able to breathe much life into it, and they've had some success in this sort of film, by which I mean representations of this era (not romance novel reflections). There are two very funny lines, though, delivered effectively and respectively by York and Grant. So don't fall asleep entirely, I guess.
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