Navy sailor John Baggs Jr. (James Caan) is on a Cinderella Liberty pass when he picks up sexy Maggie Paul (Marsha Mason) hustling pool in the city. She's a prostitute with a son named Doug. His friend former sailor Forshay (Eli Wallach) is a doorman at a bar. Baggs' records are lost and he gets no pay & no orders. He is taken aback when the social worker lets slip Maggie's pregnancy from another guy earlier.

Mason got an Oscar nomination. When she got exposed by the social worker, she has a terrific moment of desperation and anger. It's an excellent acting overall. Same goes for Caan. It's a rambling plot but that's not a problem. The actual problem is the kid. Kid actors are often a hit or miss proposition. This one is mostly a miss. He doesn't really have any charisma. It makes it more difficult to develop chemistry with Baggs. This is quite fine and would be great with a better kid.

I moved to Seattle earlier this year. The Emerald City is currently blanketed in dust by wildfires in eastern Oregon. This makes it all the more interesting to see a movie taking place in a Seattle so different from the one that we now know. Mark Rydell's "Cinderella Liberty" focuses on the relationship between a sailor (James Caan) on leave and a prostitute (Marsha Mason).

In addition to the pleasant surprise that it takes place in my adopted city, I notice that it's from the same author who wrote "The Last Detail". In case you're not familiar with that one, it depicts a pair of sailors showing a man the time of his life before he has to go to jail (the movie starred Jack Nicholson). Both movies came out at a time when it was considered uncool to go into the armed forces, but portray men who have no other outlet in life except to enlist in the military.

It's not a masterpiece, but I liked its focus on old Seattle. A person nowadays wouldn't recognize the Emerald City from half a century ago but for the Space Needle and skyscrapers.

The rest of the cast includes Eli Wallach (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly),Dabney Coleman (9 to 5),Burt Young (Rocky) and Bruno Kirby (City Slickers).

Somehow I don't think that someone in Doug's place would've been interested in a John Wayne movie.

"Cinderella Liberty" was obviously written and directed by men (in this case, the screenplay by Darryl Ponicsan, from his novel, and the direction by Mark Rydell). It features the kind of movie-hooker culled straight from the 1950s, one with a big heart, a fun-loving laugh and a dedication to her sailors--she just can't wait to get back to business. James Caan, probably the most sensitive movie tough-guy of this era, latches onto a Seattle whore (Marsha Mason) and her illegitimate, half-black pre-teen son; the three make a happy pair until Mason prematurely gives birth to the baby she's carrying. Rydell is a filmmaker who sees romance in welfare-marked squalor, and his sentiment is braced with a tough shell, yet nothing in the film makes sense. After a one-nighter with Mason, Caan meets up with her smart-aleck son by chance and instantly identifies him as her kid (there isn't a moment of recognition, just a decent man-to-man chat and the story moves on). Once Mason and Caan decide to get married, there's lots of talk regarding their union yet we never see it. The script is a connect-the-dots job, with unconvincing characters to match. Mason, despite an Oscar nod, isn't quite believable playing low-class, and every time she's uses the word "ain't" it rings false (her somewhat-chaste nudity is uncomfortable for her too, you can sense she cannot wait to cover up). Caan, frequently talking with a hick twang in his voice, plays decent and moral as if it were a dark cloud over him; he's an optimist but a hopeless one, and when he gets his ire up and fights back he is still shown getting nowhere. The picture is heavy on the bluesy Seattle night-life, but the sordid atmospherics never quite come through (this is pretty coy for an R-rated feature). Rydell and Ponicsan believe in the cliché so badly they have to conjure up a happy ending out of thin air. As for Mason, she has a quiet, reflective moment where she tells how sick she is of the mess her life has become--though in the very next scene, she's making herself up for a night on the town. You just can't keep a gold-plated lady-of-the-evening down, not even in Seattle. ** from ****