By Richard Winters
My Rating: 2 out of 10
4-Word Review: He won’t move out.
Danny (Richard Harris) is a stubborn and eccentric man who refuses to move out of an apartment building that has been marked for demolition. After his attempts to get a lawyer and also collect welfare prove futile he decides to kidnap the Marshal (Jorge Cervera) who comes to his apartment to serve him his eviction notice. He chains the Marshal to a pipe in his bathroom and then barricades himself and his three children inside. A TV news reporter (Karen Black) feels this will be a juicy story and gets permission to go up to Danny’s place in order to interview him live on the air while the police captain (Martin Landau), who was at one time an old friend to Danny, plots on a way to get him out even if it means deadly force.
This stale drama borrows on a lot elements that have been done before and fails to add anything interesting to the mix. The chief flaw is that there isn’t any explanation for why Danny won’t move out when everyone else in the building does. The apartment itself is quite cramped and nothing special and chances are he could’ve found something bigger, or just as adequate. Without proper motivation the protagonist’s quandry becomes rather irrelevant and even selfish as his stubbornness puts the rest of his family through a lot of needless stress and trauma and having the character be someone who is old and on a fixed income with nowhere else to turn, as much of a caricature as this is, would’ve at least gotten more emotional appeal from the viewer, which with the way it gets done here you really don’t get.
Harris execellent acting helps, but all his inventions start to become a bit cheesy especially his ‘gas masks’ which is nothing more than paper folded around the face with a Campbell’s soup can taped to the bottom, which apparently should be ‘sufficient’ to breath through if under attack, but look laughable and most likely the gas vapors would seep through the paper and thus making them a poor defense. Black, who would co-star with Harris 6 years later in Martin’s Day, plays a serious career driven woman, which is a nice variation from her usual flaky, ditzy types, but her character is unlikable, who initially tries to exploit Danny’s situation for her own gain and having her ‘come around’ at the end to be on his side isn’t enough to make up for it and she should’ve been portrayed as being more emphatic from the beginning.
His three children, played by Penelope Milford, Dennis Christopher, and Natasha Ryan all display the same type of personality and thus become indistinguishable and boring. They all seem to love their father quite a bit and are very loyal and yet refer to him as Danny instead of Dad, which is a bit weird. Landau displays a nice acerbic quality, and the first film where his hair begins to show a few spots of gray, but his character should’ve been the one to go up to the apartment and break into it, especially since he and Danny had a history together, versus having him remain on the ground while his men did the task, which loses out on what could’ve had more dramatic impact.
Spoiler Alert!
The first act is a strain to sit through and is approached in a way that would’ve made it better served as a TV-movie. The second act gets a little more tense when he barricades himself into the apartment and the way he uses all of his different inventions to stop the cops from getting inside is marginally entertaining, but the film leaves way too many things open ended. He eventually gets cuffed and arrested, but no closure as to what happens to him after that. Does he go to trial and win his case? Does he and his family get a new place, or does the building get saved and what happens to the Governor (Biff McGuire) who was exposed as being corrupt? None of this gets answered, which makes the ending like the rest of the film quite unsatisfying.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: October 10, 1979
Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Ray Boulting
Studio: Variety International
Available: None
Scopophilia 