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| Paula Trueman in Homebodies |
Cast: Peter Brocco, Frances Fuller, William Hansen, Ruth McDevitt, Paula Trueman, Ian Wolfe, Linda Marsh, Douglas Fowley. Screenplay: Howard Kaminsky, Bennett Sims, Larry Yust. Cinematography: Isidore Mankofsky. Art direction: John Retsek. Film editing: Peter Parasheles. Music: Bernardo Segall.
With a better director, Homebodies might have been a black comedy gem. It has an engaging, even meaningful premise, a well-chosen Cincinnati location, and a skillful cast of experienced character actors. But director and co-writer Larry Yust is unable to find a consistent tone for the film, which is sometimes sentimental, sometimes grotesque, sometimes comic, and sometimes painful. A group of elderly people, residents of an apartment house in a block that's been slated for demolition to make way for high-rise buildings, decide that they will not be moved from the place they have spent most of their lives. The most stubborn of them all, Mattie (Paula Trueman), spearheads the resistance, which starts with a series of apparently accidental deaths of workmen in the construction side, and eventually leads to the murder of the woman in charge of relocating the tenants and the particularly gruesome one of the man whose high-rise is the cause of their displacement. The trope of sweet senior citizens turning murderous is an old one, and the writers of Homebodies are to be credited for turning it into a statement about the callousness of urban redevelopment and gentrification. But the plot twist in which the old people begin to turn on one another sends the film off in another direction, one the filmmakers seem unable to resolve satisfactorily.
