| On a recent Saturday
evening the Meeker Museum pulled out all the stops to host an exclusive
screening of a rarely-seen and little-known Tim Matheson film called Those
Bedroom Eyes. Well, that's not exactly true. On a recent Saturday
evening we visited a particularly well-stocked video store and happened
to notice the title among a number of other "suspense thrillers,"
some of which were familiar and some not so familiar. We had never heard
of Those
Bedroom Eyes
and certainly didn't remember it from Tim's filmography, so of course
we decided to take it home with us for the evening and give it a good
going-over. How can you go wrong with a Tim Matheson film? Tim's leading
lady in this "lost" film was a former Mrs. Tom Cruise (Mimi
Rogers), and the art work on the box was rather intriguing. And isn't
Tim Matheson simply one of the most interesting actors in the history
of film? We've always thought so.
Well . . . sometimes
we can be really stupid around here. That title, Those
Bedroom Eyes,
should have tipped us off that the film is hardly one of the talented
Mr. Matheson's attempts to compete with Mr. Cruise, Mr. Ford, Mr. Willis,
or even Mr. Gere. In fact, this film (presumably direct-to-video) is
very much in the vein of those "erotic thrillers" that Andrew
Stevens was making a few years ago -- like Night
Eyes, Night
Eyes 2, Son
of Night Eyes
and Night
Eyes Goes Hawaiian
etc. The only difference is that in Those
Bedroom Eyes
you don't get to see Mr. Stevens' ass or Mr. Matheson's ass or anybody
else's ass, not to mention the leading lady's tits AND ass, which of
course is what people who subscribe to Cinemax usually watch these things
for. And on top of that the story seemed kind of incoherent during the
two or three minutes we were actually awake. Come to think of it, the
whole movie could have taken place in a nudist colony for all we know,
because frankly we don't remember any of it. But at least we got some
much needed sleep.
The two portraits
at the top of this page are from Dreamer,
which Tim made a year or so after his "breakthrough" in 1978's
National
Lampoon's Animal House.
A while back we actually caught a portion of Dreamer
on one of the cable channels, but since the film is about bowling --
bowling!!! -- we didn't absorb a lot of it either. However, films like
Those
Bedroom Eyes,
Dreamer,
and the bland A
Little Sex
(see below) shouldn't deter anybody from exploring the career of Tim
Matheson. His credits, which are mostly TV credits, extend all the way
back to 1961, when he appeared with Robert Young in a one-season CBS
sitcom called Window
on Main Street.
Years later when he turned up as the smirking Eric 'Otter" Stratton
in 1978's Animal
House, he
was already a showbiz veteran, if not a particularly famous one. Eventually
he would appear in almost every made-for-TV movie ever made and also
a few more watchable movies, notably the remake of To
Be or Not to Be
(1983), the sci-fi film Impulse
(1984) and A
Very Brady Sequel
(1996). More recently he appeared with Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer
in The
Story of Us,
and on TV he turns up occasionally as Vice President John Hoynes in
the superb NBC series The
West Wing.
One suspects there may be still more "lost" Tim Matheson performances
lurking in a video store near you. Go hunting.
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