Steel Magnolias

Director Herb Ross, returning to the territory he handled well in The Turning Point and The Goodbye Girl, knows how to orchestrate the tears and Fields serves him spectacularly in that department.

...is essentially a series of comic one-liners leading up to a teary tragedy, but let it be said that the one-liners are mostly funny and the tragedy deserves most, but not all, of the tears.

STEEL MAGNOLIAS is an old-fashioned klatsch film, a prefeminist relic in which a group of women eschew the public world of men in favor of the community of the coffee table.