Product Details

• Actors: Yona Elian, Kathleen Quinlan, Stephen Macht, Zipora Peled, Michael Schneider
• Format: Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home E
• VHS Release Date: June 4, 1986
• Run Time: 92 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: 6302862892
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #259,466 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Wives of missing men (POW)...interesting story

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Only one can be right, August 16, 2001

By 

Peter Shelley "petershelley" (Sydney, New South Wales Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last Winter [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Kathleen Quinlan and Yona Elian play women in Jerusalem in 1973, the wives of men missing in the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Egypt, and in an Egyptian film of POW's, they both think the same man is their husband. They must wait 2 months before he is released thanks to Henry Kissinger and they can determine which one is right. Director Riki Shelach Nissimoff's film based on a screenplay by John Herzfeld has a soap opera situation set against an exotic post-Missing wartorn landscape, though the only sense of the reality of the war is the phenomena of returning husbands being psychologically unidentifiable. This film plays as an unintentional hilarious exploration of two women not having a lesbian affair. The case for Quinlan being the winner is strong since though she is blighted by a 1970's bouffant and blue eyeliner, she has a son by her husband, though the possibility of the child as a carryover from a previous relationship is hinted at. Poor Elian is given 4 repeated flashbacks of her last encounter with her husband being a fight, and jump cuts of nearer closeups when she gives a description to the Israeli authorities. Quinlan scores some laughs in her initial resistance to Elian's pursuit of her, with a line "Go back to the screening room. It's time for the next show" and her slipping on sunglasses as she sits in a bus to ignore Elian tapping at the window, though I could have done without the editing of tigress eyes of contempt. However faced with the perceived incompetence of the Israelies, who spout "I am not the enemy" to Quinlan's "You have a body and you want to hang it on me", she soon acquiesces. Elian tells Quinlan how she aches for her husband, with Herzfeld unashamed to give her "How do you get through the nights?", and soon they take a holiday together, culminating in their nude embrace in a sauna. The director prefigures this by showing us a billboard of Brando and Maria Schneider entangled in Last Tango in Paris. Elian is then shampooing Quinlan's hair and Quinlan tells Elian that the delay in Kissinger's list of POW's gives them more time together! Shelach Nissimoff's handling of crowd scenes is particularly amateurish, with an early crowd scene of anger at the Israelies, and the reading of the Kissinger list with relatives yelling in glee, as if chosen for the baseball team, and a woman fainting because presumably she didn't make the team. Quinlan is given a slow motion run on the beach with her son like a TV commercial superimposed images of them rolling around like lovers, but one beautiful closeup when she is talking with her mother-in-law, and the hairstylist becomes kind. Elian isn't given a matching closeup of appreciation but the director does redeem himself with cross-cutting between her narrating a letter addressed to Quinlan and approaching news.