German director Percy Adlon's first film in America, aglow with the optimism of the American Dream. The story of a Bavarian tourist (the hefty Marianne Sagebrecht, of Adlon's Sugarbaby), who is abandoned by her travelling companion -- husband? -- in full mountaineering costume at the edge of the Mohave Desert, and who finds a new home among the melting-pot compound at a rundown motel-cum-coffee-shop-cum-gas-station-cum-(finally)-cabaret, appears to have every intention of becoming what is known in blurb-ese as a "feel-good movie." All that stands in the way of that goal is the likelihood that it will become a feel-indifferent movie first. Like Sugarbaby, it is a very pretty and very sweet declaration of belief in the possibility of almost anything -- rather unconvincingly borne out by the evidence. And also like that earlier movie, it matches capriciousness of plot with capriciousness of treatment: colored tints, camera tilts, spurts of fast cuts and slow motion -- not marshalled into any pattern of consistency, but dispensed in such a way as to cause the drowsing viewer to snuffle to attention, muttering a word of wonderment like "Huh?" or, if the graphics have put him specially in mind of DC comic books, "Wha--?" or even "Ods bodkins!" With CCH Pounder and Jack Palance. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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