It's My Turn (1980)

Director:

Claudia Weill

Writer:

Eleanor Bergstein (written by)

Release Date:

6 March 1981 (West Germany)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama

Tagline:

Just when she thought she had everything right...in stepped Mr. Wrong.

Plot:

A successful but stressed mathematics professor (Clayburgh) goes to her father's wedding and falls in love with her father's bride's son (Douglas)...

Plot Keywords:

Mathematics | Baseball | Wedding | New York City | Mathematical Equation

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Jill Clayburgh	...	Kate Gunzinger
Michael Douglas	...	Ben Lewin
Charles Grodin	...	Homer
Beverly Garland	...	Emma
Steven Hill	...	Jacob
Teresa Baxter	...	Maryanne
Joan Copeland	...	Rita
John Gabriel	...	Hunter
Charles Kimbrough	...	Jerome
Roger Robinson	...	Flicker
Jennifer Salt	...	Maisie
Daniel Stern	...	Cooperman
Dianne Wiest	...	Gail (as Diane Wiest)
Ron Frazier	...	Professor (as Ronald C. Frazier)
Edwin McDonough	...	Professor (as Edwin J. McDonough)

Also Known As:

A Perfect Circle

Runtime:

Spain:91 min | USA:91 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Metrocolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Canada:PG (Ontario) | Iceland:L | Australia:PG | Finland:S | USA:R

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Jill Clayburgh's proof of the "Snake Lemma" at the very beginning of the movie is technically perfect. In Charles A. Weibel's book, "An Introduction to Homological Algebra" (Cambridge U. Press, 1994), there appears the following: "We will not print the proof (of the Snake Lemma) in these notes, because it is best done visually. In fact, a clear proof is given by Jill Clayburgh at the beginning of the movie 'It's My Turn.'"

Quotes:

[First lines.]
Kate Gunzinger: Let me just show you how to *construct* the map S, which is the fun of the lemma anyhow, okay? So you assume you have an element in the kernel of gamma, that is, an element in C, such that gamma takes you to 0 in C-prime. You pull it back to B, via map g, which is surjective...
Cooperman: Hold it, hold it, hold it. That's -- that's not unique.
Kate Gunzinger: Yes, it is unique, Mr. Cooperman. Up to an element of the image of f, all right? So we've pulled it back to a fixed B here. Then you take beta of B, which takes you to 0 in C-prime, by the commutivity of the diagram. It's therefore in the kernel of the map g-prime, hence is in the image of the map f-prime, by the exactness of the lower sequence...
Cooperman: No.
Kate Gunzinger: ...so we can pull it back...
Cooperman: No.
Kate Gunzinger: ...to an element in A-prime...
Cooperman: It's not well defined!
Kate Gunzinger: ...which it turns out is *well* defined *modulo* the image of alpha. And thus defines the element in the co-kernel of alpha...
[...]

Soundtrack:

This Is My Love

SWF, professional,liberated, 30s, seeks "the real thing"

The final chapter in Jill Clayburgh's unplanned "independent woman" trilogy (the first two were "An Unmarried Woman" and "Starting Over"). This one is from the same writer as "Dirty Dancing," which probably explains why the main character in each is a Jewish woman who is very much "daddy's little girl."

Here, the protagonist is perhaps the most glamorous mathematics professor ever (she wears stilettos to class, but earthy gal that she is, removes them while solving equations at the blackboard). She's got relationship issues with her widowed dad who's remarrying, and with her divorced live-in boyfriend, plus she's conflicted about whether to take a new job in a new city that pays much more, but won't allow her to continue her research. She breezily describes her various complications as "modern problems," which tells you that the creators here felt they were at the very cutting edge of portraying the quintessential "liberated" woman. Laura Linney's character in "You Can Count On Me" had a similarly complicated life, but that film didn't feel the need for its characters to be so self-aware.

Michael Douglas enters the picture to help her figure out where/how to get the healthy, giving relationship that everyone around her seems to have, and that therefore is "her turn" to get (get it?)

This is a decent movie that actually doesn't feel particularly dated, (save for Clayburgh's Oscar-bait "big scene" towards the end) despite its obvious 70's era feminist overtones. But perhaps because of its agenda, the romance doesn't exactly sweep you off your feet.

As with most movies from the 80s, part of the fun is seeing what stars/faces of the future show up. Here, we get a young Daniel Stern, almost unrecognizable as Clayburgh's star pupil, and future "Law and Order" District Attorneys Steven Hill and Dianne Wiest.