“Queen Bees” (MA) ***

THIS movie, set among the inmates of an aged people’s up-market home, made me smile occasionally. But I grimaced in almost equal measure. 

Its theme is a condition of which we will all get a taste of unless we fall off the twig earlier. Oscar-winning Ellen Burstyn, who will turn 90 at the end of this year, plays Helen, a widow who one evening forgets that there’s a naked flame on the stove in the house where she lived with her late husband.

The firies get there in time, but repairs will take a while. Helen’s family decides that an old folks home will be the best place for her until they are complete. 

And as the insurance company inspector values one repair site in her home, he discovers another, meaning that Helen will have to stay at Pine Grove Senior Community longer than she expects.

Helen is an independent widow who finds that Pine Grove is rather like high school – full of cliques and flirtatious suitors. What she initially avoids leads her to exactly what she has been missing – new friendships and a chance at love again with newcomer Dan.

Most of director Michael Lembeck’s medium-length, moving-image career is in TV series – of the 68 titles listed in his filmography, five look as though they might have been for the big screen. 

Donald Martin’s 58-titles-long list of screenplays is mostly for American TV series that never made it here. He wrote this one with the help of Harrison Powell whose filmic CV lists only one as writer. There’s much in “Queen Bees” dialogue to delight cliché-collectors. You may draw whatever conclusions you can be bothered to draw.

I watched one (and only one) passage in “Queen Bees” with respect, admiration even – for two actors (Ms Burstyn and Afro-American actress Loretta Devine), and the lines that Donald and Harrison gave them to tell each other about men, sex and Loretta’s boobs while lying together in bed and sharing a freshly-rolled joint. Being old doesn’t necessarily mean that characters can’t have some lively fun. Alas, there has to be more than one swallow to make a summer.

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