User Reviews

When Hollywood or the TV moguls see a movie that scores with audiences, they naturally are tempted to make a sequel. This has been going on since the earliest days of filmdom and TV. Very few sequels stand up to the original film, and those that top the first renditions are rare indeed. But, following big hits, the studio and network chiefs can't be demeaned for trying to capitalize on success. Besides, most sequels don't have to top the original. Most just have to be good to make them pay and earn a nifty profit.

But there are those that are total flops. And "The Gathering: Part II" is one of them. With this one, it seems all too apparent that there was bad judgment galore. In the first place, most sequels have some continuity with the main threads of the original carrying forward into the sequel. But this film had none of that. The reconciliation of father and son (Adam and Bud) was a fact and accomplished. And Adam has since died. So, there are no continuity threads. Instead, there is a very weak link established for the Thornton family in its business that Adam had started and built up.

But the story, with its "possible" blooming romance between Kate (Maureen Stapleton) and Victor Wainwright (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) is just not believable. It would be if there was some fire in the roles and/or some oomph in the script. But this is little more than a series of ultra-slow moving scenes pieced together in which the main characters seem as though they are vying in a contest to see who can bore the audience the most. There are a couple of scenes with other family members that have some life, but the acting there is hammy and shallow as well.

Maureen Stapleton, who's fine performance carried the original film, was so poorly directed in this second go. We have one long, long shot after another of a close-up of Kate just looking, thinking and saying nothing. Those were opportunities for napping, except I thought there must be something more to this, so I didn't lose all concentration.

I think my three stars may be charitable. I only gave them because I had just enough interest to hope that the movie was going somewhere. The only place it's going is into my recycle bin. I wouldn't want someone in a thrift store to lay out $2 or $3 for this film and feel she or he wasted good money.

This insipid effort is a sequel to the superior 1977 TV film "The Gathering," with Maureen Stapleton and Ed Asner as an estranged couple grappling at Christmas with profound issues of mortality, alienation and reconciliation. "The Gathering II" limpingly tries to address similar issues at Christmas 2 years after the patriarch's (Asner's) death. "Gathering II" does not attain the level of its predecessor.

The wonderful cast of "Gathering I" is only partly re-united for "II." The most notable shift is in the casting of the Thorntons' younger son, Bud, Gregory Harrison in the earlier film, here replaced by Jameson Parker in a sadly overwrought performance. (In the 1st film, Bud was seen only briefly; now he has returned to the US from his Canadian draft-dodging exile and is an annoyingly sulky presence throughout most of the film.) Bud's wife, briefly but engagingly played by Stephanie Zimbalist in Gathering I, is not present here, which seems odd since her father, Efrem Zimbalist Jr, has joined the cast as Mrs Thornton's ardent swain, suspected by her children of having his eye on Thornton Industries and not Mother Thornton's hand.

The rest of the cast is well remembered from "Gathering I," and do what they can to help this lame dinosaur move along, but it's a lost cause. The script tries to touch on many late '70s buzz topics including unwed cohabitation, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, and autumn romance. But the writers never found the yellow brick road that would have let them handle these themes gracefully or with any balance. "Maude" dealt with them much more capably. There are gaping holes in what passes for a plot here, most wretchedly in the abrupt, unconvincing way in which the Thornton children accept her relationship with Wainwright; even in the case of the hild most aggressively opposed to the courtship (Julie, again played by the engaging Rebecca Balding), we really don't get any plausible reason why she suddenly drops her objections, which until the end of the film are the one thing that has kept this particular "plot" thread erratically unwinding.

The impressive Gail Strickland gives a fine account of herself as elder daughter Peggy, who has recently ended a long-term cohabitation with Aaron (a new actor too), but discovers just before Christmas that she is pregnant by him. Strickland is the standout in "Gathering II" as she negotiates her feelings about motherhood and her feelings for Aaron; her conversation with him, when he phones on Christmas Eve, comes close to the best one-way phone conversations on film; it may well surpass Luise Rainer's Oscar-winning turn in "The Great Ziegfeld," and most definitely outstrips Joan Crawford's in "The Women." While she decides to "stay pregnant" as the writers awkwardly put it, it's left undecided whether she will keep the baby or not. (I have a suspicion this might have been meant as the springboard for a 3rd Thornton Christmas film. If so, we're lucky that one got shelved.)

Other cast members are wasted here, particularly the lustrous Veronica Hamel, who played a pivotal role in "Gathering I" by persuading her husband Tom (Lawrence Pressman) to attend the Christmas reunion Adam Thornton Sr so desperately wants. This time around she is given little to do but welcome guests and go shopping, and it's a disappointment. I longed for dialog among Strickland, Hamel and Balding about the unplanned pregnancy, but it never happens.

Pressman's Tom Thornton is involved in 2 "plot" threads: Wainwright's intentions toward Mrs Thornton, and an initially puzzling conflict between Tom and Bud. He does his best in both cases, and contributes admirably in the case of his mystifying conflict with Bud. The Wainwright thread is badly handled as it is, and Tom's part in it, while apparently clear at first (he uses business connections to find out whether Wainwright is after Stapleton or the family business), succumbs in the end to the same vagueness that surrounds Julie's sudden acceptance of Wainwright as Stapleton's suitor. The conflict between Tom and Bud is opaque, largely as a result of Parker's unfocused performance (though his problems may well have arisen from a bad script or disinterested direction). Bud's revelation of the cause of his distance from Tom is minimally plausible as a case of sibling rivalry in their relationships with their late father, but the actual resolution of the quarrel is left to the disappointingly mechanical solution of a water fight between the brothers--which strikes me as a desperate effort by the writers to end the thread as quickly as they could.

Annoying miscalculations plague the film throughout. In Gathering I, Julie's children are appealing, round-faced blonde tykes; here, 2 years later, they are thin, black-haired and in the case of the boy, a quite unattractive brat who deliberately tells his sister there is no Santa Claus. The children's' only other function here is to raise topics in conversation that spark flashbacks by one family member or another to pivotal moments in the family's past. Bud's son, the infant baptized on Christmas Day in the 1st film, now appears to be about 4 years old, walking well and fully capable of articulate conversation, albeit the 2nd film supposedly takes place only 2 years after the 1st. I don't agree that Mother Thornton's new house is a distraction; after her husband's death she might well have chosen to move out of the family home, with its memories good and bad.

I purchased the Warner Archive 2-disk package to secure a decent version of the classic "Gathering I," and in that at least I wasn't disappointed. The quality of the DVD far surpasses the terrible VHS bootleg disk I made do with for so long, and I'm delighted to have it at long last. Warner might well have omitted "Gathering II" from the package.