The movie equivalent of the kind of novel that no self-respecting literary critic would condescend to notice: one of those sweeping, sprawling, flag-waving, button-popping, bodice-ripping, lusty, busty historical romances that have "best-seller" written literally all over them — all over their paperback covers at any rate, in close proximity to names like Belva Plain and John Jakes. Plot summary: Tom Cruise is (try not to laugh) a poor Irish potato farmer in the 1890s, who sets out to avenge himself on the wealthy landlord responsible in the death of his Da, runs away to America with the landlord's feisty red-headed daughter instead, lives with her platonically in a Boston brothel, enjoys a run of success as a bare-knuckle boxer, falls again on hard times, loses his travelling mate to her pursuing fiancé, and ends up nose to tail with them in the Oklahoma Land Rush in fulfillment of his dead Da's parting advice, reiterated in flashback for the short-memoried moviegoer: "Without land, a man is nothing." Sort of Wuthering Heights crossed with It Happened One Night crossed with Kid Galahad crossed with Cimarron crossed with heaven knows what all — maybe a Wells Fargo Bank home-loan commercial. Ron Howard, whose susceptibility to best-selleritis was first observed in his Backdraft, has fashioned here a fanatically creedbound and fuddy-duddy movie that pretends to be on the side of the young and the "modern," and a lush, fat-cat, conspicuously consuming movie that pretends to be on the side of the Little Man. Yet for all the opulence and the orthodoxy, he is always on the lookout for the short cut, the easy way, the fast shuffle. He is, to put it more plainly, American to his fingertips. With Nicole Kidman. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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