Masquerade (1988)

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The three male leads in this harbor side drama set in the hamptons, on long island are all perfect sleezeballs...and dana delany and kim catrall are equally up to the task...meg tilly made a good naive dupe with untold millions to feather her nest...the cost of trimming out a yacht racing boat is perhaps more costly than the depth of the deepest ocean trench...rob lowe is no sailor and likely doesn't know a bowline from a sheepshank or marlin spike from a marlin so he barely gets the job done....a real sailor doesn't need hype, just knowledge of the winds and his boat...i guess the same could be said about a husband and wife

Rob Lowe is well-cast as a yacht racing captain/gigolo on the east coast, one who's conspiring with a sniveling con-man to get rid of a sheltered heiress worth millions, but the role isn't even one-layer deep, not requiring much from the actor (instead, the picture flatters Lowe with a series of dreamy movie star close-ups). Less a murder-mystery than a magazine-spread posing as one, this gauzy, posh affair set in the Hamptons was written by Dick Wolf as if he were trying for a potboiler novella. Meg Tilly does fine in an illogical role, John Glover once again works wonders as the proverbial hissable villain, but the other performances fall short. The movie, too, for all its mechanical twists that attempt to ratchet up the suspense, slides quickly from the mind, almost before its finished. ** from ****

"Masquerade" is a crime thriller set among the wealthy inhabitants of the Hamptons, a socially exclusive part of Long Island. The main character is Olivia Lawrence, a young heiress who has been left tremendously wealthy by the recent death of her mother. (Olivia's father has died several years earlier). Olivia forms a relationship with Tim Whalen, a yacht skipper, but this causes friction with her stepfather Tony Gateworth, who suspects that Tim is only interested in Olivia for her wealth. There may be something in his suspicions, as Tim is also carrying on with attractive older woman Brooke, his employer's wife. Gateworth's objections to Tim, however, seem hypocritical, as it is obvious that he only married Olivia's mother for her money and has lost no time since her death in moving his new mistress, Anne, into the family mansion.The title is significant. "Masquerade" is the name of Olivia's yacht, but the word "masquerade", literally a masked ball, can also signify a charade or pretence, and several of the characters are pretending to be something they are not, pretences which are revealed in a series of twists. Tim and Gateworth seem to hate one another, but it is suddenly revealed that they are plotting together to murder Olivia for her money. During a confrontation between Gateworth, Tim and Olivia, however, Gateworth is killed when his pistol goes off during a struggle with Tim. Officer McGill, a local cop and former boyfriend of Olivia, is put in charge of the investigation into Gateworth's death.There are no really outstanding acting performances in this film, but Meg Tilly makes a convincingly innocent Olivia, even though at 28 she was several years older than her character. Rob Lowe does enough to show that he was more than just a Brat Pack pretty-boy, even though he shows enough flesh to keep his most ardent female fans happy. (Tim is supposed to be older than Olivia, but in reality Lowe was four years younger than Tilly). There are certain similarities between this film and "Wild Things", a thriller from 1998, which also has a plot involving yachting and differences in social class. (That film, however, was set in Florida rather than Long Island). "Masquerade", however, is by far the better of the two films, and part of the reason, I think, lies in the way in which the thriller genre developed over the intervening ten years. Although the plot of "Masquerade" contains several twists (there are a couple more after those mentioned above), it always remains perfectly comprehensible. By 1998, however, there was a tendency (one which has continued into the twenty-first century) for the scriptwriters of films like these to demonstrate their cleverness by devising excessively complicated plots; that of "Wild Things" contains so many twists that it ends up twisted out of all recognition, and almost totally incomprehensible to the average viewer, even with the assistance of a series of flashbacks interspersed with the closing credits and intended to make good all the numerous plot holes in the actual movie. Pauline Kael described "Masquerade" as a "tranquil and sophisticated thriller". "Tranquil" may seem an odd choice of adjective to describe a thriller, especially one in which several characters meet violent deaths, yet I know what she meant. "Masquerade" lacks not only the silly-cleverness that mars films like "Wild Things", it also lacks the cynical amorality that is their stock-in-trade. Towards the end I was waiting for some truly devastating silly-clever twist, like Olivia 's mother and Gateworth both coming back from the dead, or Olivia turning out to have planned the whole thing with her lesbian lover Brooke. Yet nothing like this happens. The twist is that there is no twist. There is no assumption that an obviously innocent person must be guilty; Olivia turns out to be just as sweet and naïve as she has always seemed. Moreover, Tim, whatever his original motives may have been, turns out to have genuinely fallen in love with her and selflessly sacrifices his own life while saving hers. It comes as quite a surprise to come across a thriller that does not take a completely cynical view of human nature. 7/10

"Masquerade" is a movie about wealth and its destructive partner in crime, greed. Meg Tilly is 'Olivia Lawrence', the young rich heiress who seems to have finally found her perfect man, but not everybody is who they appear to be.Bob Swaim's thriller is very slick and modern, having its share of sex and violence. Yet to his credit, our director allows the film's plot to dot the bulk of the work. The script is well balanced, and contains enough twists to keep its audience guessing.Topping it all off is Meg Tilly's fine performance. Also starred Rob Lowe, Kim Cattrall, Doug Savant and John Glover. Intriguing.Saturday, August 8, 1992 - Video