Tag Archives: Ryan O’ Neal

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Posted on August 16, 2020 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: Conflict behind enemy lines.

Based on the true story of Operation Market Garden that occurred in September, 1944.  The strategy was, in an effort to hasten the end of WWII, to have allied forces drive into Germany and lock up key bridges, which would then block any attempts at German escape, but errors in judgement and planning occurred that caused many unnecessary casualties.

At the time this was one of the most expensive films every produced, but the reaction from critics was tepid.  While the producers insisted that every attempt was made for accuracy they also admitted to taking certain liberties for logistical reasons, which ultimately did not go over well with everyone. Many friends and spouses of the soldiers depicted in the film who were still around at the time complained about what they felt was misrepresentation in regards to what really happen and threatened to sue the filmmakers for libel.

Despite some obvious flaws, which can occur in any film that is this long, I came away quite impressed and even genuinely moved by what I saw. Some of the most memorable moments for me was seeing the parachute drop of thousands of allied paratroopers onto the Netherlands. It is one thing to see old pictures of this, and there are many available, but a completely other thing to have it done via live action in living color.  Another moving scene features Robert Redford reciting a prayer out loud as he and other men maneuver a boat across a river while bombs and artillery fire blast all around them, which is so vivid it made me tense up like I was at risk of getting hit just like the other men.

Another running segment I really liked dealt with the army taking over a couple’s house that was right next to a crucial bridge by barging in unannounced and turning the place into their headquarters. So many other war movies that I’ve seen have never shown this side of battle where innocent pedestrians and homeowners can literally just lose all of their rights on-the-spot and have no recourse. Watching their home get more and more torn-up  by the army as the film progresses is both darkly comical and horrifying as is the eventual mental breakdown of the home’s family.

Many of the complaints that critics had about the movie resided around the large cast and how certain actors were miscast especially Ryan O’Neal as Brigadier General James Gavin. While I admit O’Neal is a weak actor in most cases I came away feeling he did quite well here although if you see a picture of the real Gavin the two look nothing alike. My main criticism in this area was more around the appalling amount of money that the cast made with all of them collecting a fee of $250,000 per week, which would come out to $1,157,540 in today’s dollars while Redford made $500,000 per week that came out to $2,315,000. Now I have nothing against actors making as much money as they can, but many of the parts were just walk-ons and had only a few lines, so to make that kind of money for that little of work seemed obscene, but I guess if I were one of them I wouldn’t complain either.

A much bigger problem was the extreme shifts in tone and a misguided use of music. War time flicks, especially those made in the 40’s and 50’s had a lot of music, which was fine for the period, by many post 60’s films tried to stay away from an excessive soundtrack in order to capture more of the sounds of battle and heighten the realism. This movie though seems to want it both ways having virtually no music during the first-half and then suddenly without warning bombarding the viewer with a lot of it during the second-half, which gets the viewer caught up in the natural sounds of war only to ultimately take them away from it by the end.

While the film has many serious moments it also allows some quirky comedy to seep in, which like with the music issue came-off as jarring and unnecessary. Older war movies kept things on a patriotic level, but post 60’s the trend was to be irreverent, which in movies like Catch-22, can be done brilliantly. Here though it cheapens the effect making the viewer wonder how authentic it is when trendy, modern sentiments get haphazardly thrown-in.

Overall it succeeds at showing the absurdity of war in a profoundly visual way as we see first-hand the brutal injuries and deaths of the soldiers just trying to carry out their orders while the general who came up with the bad plan that killed so many sits in his plush office far removed the destruction that he created and never forced to face the horror of his mistakes.

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: June 15, 1977

Runtime: 2 Hours 55 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Richard Attenborough

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Epic, Historical Drama, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies Based on Novels, War Movies

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So Fine (1981)

Posted on May 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Jeans that expose ass.

Bobby Fine (Ryan O’Neal) is an English professor at a college waiting to get tenure who inexplicably becomes the head of his father’s clothing company, which produces women’s apparel, when his father Jack Fine (Jack Warden) is unable to pay off a debt that he has with a local loan shark named Eddie (Richard Kiel). Bobby knows nothing about the clothing business, but inadvertently strikes on a hot idea, jeans that look like they’re revealing a woman’s butt cheeks, which becomes a huge fashion sensation. Unfortunately Bobby also starts having an affair with Eddie’s wife Lira (Mariangela Melato) which jeopardizes not only his newfound success, but his life as well.

The film was written and directed by Andrew Bergman who was just coming off great success as the screenwriter for The In-Laws and was fully expecting this film to do just as well, but instead it had less than a 2-week run in the theaters. Much of this can be blamed on the humor, which is lowbrow and farcical while failing to give any new insights into the clothing business, or anything else for that matter. The jeans themselves don’t look sexy either as plastic gets used in replacement of the real butt cheeks where exposing the actual ass would’ve been far more provocative.

O’Neal’s affair with Melato is both unfunny and dumb. Why would such a good-looking guy, who could easily get women to fall for him,  fall suddenly head-over-heals to a wife of a mobster who will kill him instantly if he found out? This guy teaches at a college, so why not get into a sexual relationship with one of the coeds, who are most likely younger and better looking than this middle-aged woman and does not have the baggage of a marriage?

The climactic sequence, which takes place at an opera is when this thing really jumps-the-shark as it features Melato coming out of the audience and agreeing to replace the leading lady on stage when she falls ill, but how would Melato have known all the words to the music without having been to any of the rehearsals? This segment also features Kiel getting on stage and becoming a part of the opera as well where he sings in fluent Italian even though it was never established earlier that he knew the language.

It was fun seeing Kiel, who built a career by playing a lot of mindless hulks most notably in the James Bond films, being given more speaking lines than usual, but I noticed the very apparent lump on his forehead, which in his other films I didn’t. Maybe this was because in the Bond movies he was given metal teeth, which is what got the viewer’s attention and took away from the lump, which here I found became a distraction.

Melato, who was a big star in Italy particularly with the films she did with director Lina Wertmuller, gets completely wasted in a thankless, one-dimensional role of an over-sexed vamp that is neither funny nor interesting. O’Neal, whose best bit may just be the perplexed expression he conveys in the film’s poster seen above, is adequate, but upstaged by Warden who is far funnier and the movie would’ve worked better had he been the star.

The jeans angle, which features a TV-ad that has Anita Morris as one of the dancers, is brief and more of a side-story while the emphasis is on O’Neal’s fling with Melato that isn’t very inspired and no surprise why this ultimately failed at the box office.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: September 25, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Andrew Bergman

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive), YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, College Life, Farce, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Sex

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Nickelodeon (1976)

Posted on April 14, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Making a silent movie.

The year is 1913 and Leo Harrigan (Ryan O’Neal) is tired of being a lawyer and representing sleazy clients, so by chance he gets a job writing scripts for silent movie mogul H.H. Cobb (Brian Keith). Later on he’s sent to California to direct his first silent film, but he has no experience doing that and finds that he has a rough relationship with the film’s leading man Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds).

When this film first came out Columbia Pictures was convinced that they had a big hit on their hands and to celebrate they allowed everyone attending the L.A. premiere to pay only 5 cents to get in, in order to correspond to the price of admission during the silent film era. Yet many of those who attended were not satisfied with the movie causing critic David Sheehan to claim “it wasn’t worth paying a nickel to see.”

It’s hard to know who to blame as both sides have differing accounts for what went wrong. David Begelman, the then head of Columbia Pictures, loved the script, which was written by W.D. Richter and had by all accounts a good dramatic edge to it, but when they gave it to Peter Bogdanovich to read he described it as a ‘piece of garbage’. Yet they decided to hire Bogdanovich to direct it anyways by promising him he could change the script any way he wanted as Begelman considered Bogdanovich to be a ‘cinematic genius’ and that ‘everything he touched turned to gold’. Bogdanovich on the other hand stated that he liked the script as it was, but was pressured by the studio to add in farcical elements as they were hoping to recreate the magic of his earlier film What’s Up Doc?.

In either case the attempted comedy doesn’t work and the gags, which come at a rapid-fire pace, ultimately become more mind numbing than anything. The only funny bit is the extended fistfight between O’Neal and Reynolds while everything else sinks into mundane silliness. Supposedly some of the story is based on the real-life remembrances  of film veterans Raoul Walsh and Allan Dwan, but with so much misguided zaniness thrown in it’s hard to know what if anything to take seriously.

The story desperately needed more of a focus. Having it about a small cast and crew trying to make their first silent film and the many challenges that it would entail could’ve been both amusing and revealing, but the story jumps ahead too much. We see the characters in one setting at one moment and then on a whim the film fast forwards to them in some completely different setting a year or more later, which never allows the viewer to connect emotionally with the people or what they’re going through.

O’ Neal is good playing a befuddled sort who simply reacts to the goofiness around him while Reynolds is excellent as the rough and tough good ole boy and their budding love/hate friendship should’ve been the film’s main focus. Supermodel Jane Hitchcock, in her one and only feature film appearance, is easy on the eyes, but her part was originally intended for Cybill Shepherd, who would’ve given the role more edge.

The cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs is pristine as is the period detail, but the story takes on too much especially the second hour, which just goes from one tangent to another.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: December 21, 1976

Runtime: 2 Hours 2 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Comedy, Parody

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Oliver’s Story (1978)

Posted on March 8, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Adjusting to wife’s death.

It’s been 6 years since Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) lost his wife to leukemia and he’s still having a hard time learning to move on from it. He hasn’t been in a serious relationship since and his friends including his step father (Edward Binns) are pressuring him to start dating. Finally by chance he meets Marci (Candice Bergen) while she is out jogging. She is secretly an heiress to a massive fortune, which allows the two to connect due to their similar well-to-do upbringings, but when things start to get serious Oliver finds himself  resisting unable to cut the ties from his past and move forward.

This is definitely a sequel that nobody asked for and in fact both O’Neal and Bergen initially had no interest doing it. The original film worked because it centered on the couple and when you take away one of them you have only half a movie. Oliver on his own is boring and watching him learn to adjust to life as a single person is not compelling and no different than the hundreds of other movies dealing with the dating scene.

John Marley, who played Jenny’s father in the first film, refused to appear in this one because he was unhappy with how his name was going to be placed in the credits, so he got replaced by Edward Binns who seems to be playing a completely different character. Here the father-in-law and Oliverhave acquired a chummy friendship and even hang out together despite this never having been established in the first film. Ray Milland reprises his role as Oliver’s father, but gets portrayed in a much more likable way while in the first one he came off more as a heavy.

The film’s only interesting aspect is seeing how much the social norms have changed. Here being single is considered like a disease and his pesky friends are emboldened enough to set Oliver up on dates and openly telling him that he needs to ‘get out more’ even though by today’s standards the single lifestyle is much more prevalent and accepted and doing these same types of actions now by well meaning friends would be considered intrusive and obnoxious.

Having one of the women that he meets at a dinner party invite him back to her place despite barely knowing him is something not likely to occur today either. The way though that Oliver meets Marcie is the most absurd as he quite literally chases her down while she is jogging, which would scare most women into thinking that they had a crazy stalker on their hands.

On the production end the film is competently made with the springtime scenery of New York as well as shots of the couple’s trip to Hong Kong being the only thing that I enjoyed. The story though lacks punch and drones on with too many side dramas. O’Neal’s performance is good, but his chemistry with Bergen is lacking, which ultimately makes this a production that had misfire written all over it before a single frame of it was even shot.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: December 15, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: John Korty

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video,  YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with Nudity, Romance, Sequels

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Love Story (1970)

Posted on February 24, 2019 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Romance and then death.

Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) is attending Harvard Law School where he meets Jenny (Ali MacGraw) a student studying classical music. The two don’t hit-it-off at first, but eventually fall in love and marry despite the objections of Oliver’s father (Ray Milland). Just as things seem to be falling into place Jenny gets diagnosed with a fatal illness, which sends Oliver’s world spinning out-of-control.

Erich Segal’s script, which he later turned into a best-selling novel, is simplistic, but the on-location shooting done in and around Harvard is outstanding and helps give the film, along with some well done hockey footage, an added energy. This is one of only a few films to be allowed to shoot there and they were kicked out after only a week due to being too much of a distraction, but it was just enough to give the movie a good authentic college vibe. The snowy landscape plays a big part of it and there’s even a scene where the two play in it, but some shots feature a lot of it in the background only to have a few scenes spliced in where there is none of it on the ground, which makes it a bit visually jarring.

On the romantic side I liked the fact that Jenny is initially prickly towards Oliver and he has to work at getting her to soften up. Men actually do enjoy a challenge and having a woman just throw herself at a guy, or having the relationship start out seamlessly is just not as interesting or realistic. However, having Oliver profess that he ‘loves’ her after only the first date glosses over the courtship aspect too much and essentially ruins the intrigue in the process.

O’Neal is excellent here and he was picked over a lot of other big name stars simply for his ability to react to a situation in effective ways, which he ends up doing quite well. Yet I felt it would’ve worked better had he been the one from the poor-side-of-town as he’s more convincing as a rugged blue collar type instead of a studious student, or their contrasting economic backgrounds not been played-up at all since for me it didn’t really add much.

Spoiler Alert!

The film’s most notorious flaw though, and one that was parodied in a very funny send-up of the movie on ‘The Carol Burnett Show’, is the whole mystery illness thing (supposedly it’s leukemia, but never explicitly stated) that comes out of nowhere without Jenny ever showing an symptoms and having her die in a sudden car accident would’ve solved this issue and been more believable.

Personally though I was more shocked by the fact that the Dr. tells Oliver about Jenny’s diagnosis before he informs her. If she were a child that would be fine, but she’s an adult and deserves to know about her own health affairs before anyone else and if this had occurred today it would’ve gotten him into a lot of trouble.

The narrative also gets a bit askew as Oliver takes the news much harder than she does. Shot after shot shows him getting all misty-eyed almost like the viewer should feel worse for him, as he is now losing the object of his affections instead of her for losing her life.

End of Spoiler Alert!

The film is also famous for the line “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”, which to me never made any sense as relationships are dependent on the other party asking for forgiveness when they’ve done wrong and simply presuming they can get away with anything and expect unconditional acceptance doesn’t work. Two of my female friends agreed with me on this, which only proves how placid and shallow this film ultimately is.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: December 16, 1970

Runtime: 1 Hour 40 Minutes

Rated GP

Director: Arthur Hiller

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Classic, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, College Life, Drama, Romance

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Irreconcilable Differences (1984)

Posted on May 29, 2017 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Girl divorces her parents.

Nine-year-old Casey (Drew Barrymore) has decided she’s had enough of her parents (Shelley Long, Ryan O’Neal) and wants to get a divorce from them by using the emancipation law, which states that a minor can be freed of their parents if it is found that they have not meet their legal or equitable duty. Her mother and father fight this in court, but in the process are forced to expose all their skeletons including the awkward way they first meet, their affairs and eventual disdain for the other.

What surprised me most is O’Neal’s presence. His career has become so tarnished by his own real-life accusations of poor parenting that I would’ve thought this material would hit too close-to-home and he’d avoid it, but at the time this was considered a career resuscitator for him even though it ended up being only a brief one. His performance is actually quite funny making this his best work since What’s Up Doc?

I was equally impressed with Long who plays completely against type. Normally she’s best as snotty, prissy types, but here she reveals a much more vulnerable side and does quite well. At one point I even felt some genuine sympathy for her, which is something I’ve never felt at any other time with any of the other parts that she has played.

Sharon Stone, who gets listed in the opening credits as being ‘introduced’ even though she had already had a part in another theatrical feature Deadly Blessing that came out three years earlier, lends strong support. The way her character transitions from a wide-eyed free-spirit to bitchy Hollywood diva is quite entertaining and she looks great especially when topless. However, the bit where she exposes her excessively hairy armpits is gross and kind of tainted my image of her the rest of the way.

The script, which is based loosely on the relationship between Peter Bogdanovich and his wife Polly Platt with the Sharon Stone character representing Cybill Shephard who became the other woman, is sharp and filled with a lot of Hollywood in-jokes. The two funniest bits are the conversations between the guests at a chic Hollywood party as well as a glimpse of O’Neal’s disastrous attempt to direct a big budget rip-off of Gone With the Wind by trying to turn it into a musical.

The film though spends too much time on the parents while almost forgetting about Barrymore who’s only seen sporadically. The story also takes too long to play out with a final reconciliation segment that is overdone and sappy and helps to lose the wonderfully cynical tone that the film had earlier.

The only truly interesting aspect about the film is that Barrymore later used this same emancipation law to divorce herself from her real parents when she turned 15 and stated in interviews that she did it based off of the idea that she got from doing this movie.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: September 28, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 53Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Charles Shyer

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies with Nudity, Romance, Satire

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The Driver (1978)

Posted on April 27, 2017 | 3 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: A professional getaway driver.

Ryan O’Neal plays a man who makes a living as a getaway driver for crooks leaving the scene of a crime. His driving skills are superior and in the criminal underworld his services are in high demand. Bruce Dern plays a police detective obsessed with catching this elusive driver. He makes a deal with a couple of bad guys (Joseph Walsh, Rudy Ramos) to hire this driver for their next robbery and then set him up for a police trap. The Driver is initially reluctant to work with the two, but eventually joins them only to ultimately look for help from a beautiful French woman known as the Player (Isabelle Adjani) to get him out of his jam.

I’ve never been much of an O’Neal fan, but here his lack of acting depth makes the movie more intriguing. The part was originally intended for Steve McQueen who would’ve given the role the stereotypically gritty treatment, but O’Neal has more of a boyish male model demeanor which makes you question whether he is tough enough, or brazen enough to handle the driving demands, so seeing him flourish when you’re not quite expecting it gives the character an interesting edge. I also liked the fact that at times even he conveys nervous facial expressions as he takes the vehicle through dangerous turns, which helps show even the ‘cool guys’ are human.

Dern easily steals the picture as he continues to find entertaining ways to give unique and memorable touches to all the characters that he plays. The dialogue that his character utters conforms yet again to his patented delivery. For instance he accuses his partner (Matt Clark) of possibly being a ‘fruitter’. In the past men of the gay persuasion were sometimes called ‘fruits’, but never a ‘fruitter’ which is a word he totally makes-up and would be considered inane and silly if said by anyone else, but when said with Dern’s patented delivery it makes the character seem even more unhinged and threatening instead. In fact Dern’s conversations with Clark are some of the movie’s best moments.

Although Adjani’s screen time is limited and I still enjoyed her presence and the fact that she doesn’t show any of the typical female vulnerability, but instead seems more stoic than any of the men makes her stand out from other female characters of that era. It’s also fun seeing her facial expression turned to an almost catatonic state during the film’s high octane final chase sequence.  Ronee Blakely doesn’t fare quite as well as she says her lines in too much of a monotone fashion though the ironic way that her character meets her demise does deserves a few points.

The chases are exciting particularly the opening one, which is done at night and the one done inside a car garage in which O’Neal intentionally destroys the car that he is driving in an attempt to teach the two other occupants that he is with a lesson. The cat-and-mouse scenario inside an abandoned warehouse that makes up the bulk of the film’s final chase is slick as well, but I felt there needed to be at least one more chase added as the film gets talky in-between and away from the action, which is what people that come to these type of films genres expect especially with the title that it has.

Writer/director Walter Hill shows a keen eye for detail and manages to capture everything, even an abandoned parking garage with a stylish allure. The script is smart and sophisticated with the character’s expressing themselves by using only the most minimum of words possible. The plot has a unique quality, but still manages to stay believable and why this thing failed at the box office and was chastised by the critics at the time is hard to understand, but it’s gained a strong cult following since and deserves more attention for being years ahead-of-its-time.

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: July 28, 1978

Runtime: 1Hour 31Minutes

Rated R

Director: Walter Hill

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Blu-ray (Region B/2)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Fast Cars/Car Chase, Heist Movies, Moody/Stylish, Police Drama

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The Main Event (1979)

Posted on January 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

main-event

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Babs promotes a boxer.

Hillary Kramer (Barbra Streisand) is an owner of a successful perfume company who suddenly finds that all of her financial assets have been stolen by an unscrupulous business manager. The only thing she has left is a contract with a down-and-out boxer named Eddie ‘Kid Natural’ Scanlon (Ryan O’Neal). She decides to become his manager and promote him even though he is through with boxing and much more content at working as a driving instructor.

Barbra is quite enjoyable and the one thing that manages to hold it all together even though I couldn’t stand her frizzy hair look and wished she had just kept it straight, but as a comic character she is good. I was amazed at how much she makes fun of herself including an open bit that takes potshots at her world famous nose. There are other segments that reverse her feminist stance as well where the man, or in this case the O’Neal character, feels like he’s being ‘objectified’ by her and after they sleep together feeling ‘used’ when she isn’t quite ready to get into a relationship. Amazingly she even allows herself to be clad in very tight fitting shorts and in one rather explicit moment bends down in them, which again being the famous feminist that we know she is in real-life seemed surprising, but I liked the fact that she can show a playful side and that she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

Unfortunately O’Neal is the wrong man as her co-star as he is too weak of an actor and cannot keep up with her strong personality. Trying to play these two off as equals doesn’t work as he has no ability to counter her comic punch and his attempts at seeming exacerbated are forced and not funny. Sure they had success earlier with What’s Up Doc? but that was because he played a character that got run over and dominated by hers, which is the only way their contrasting styles would succeed on celluloid.

The film though still manages to be funny and I was ready to give this a 7 until it peters out like air coming out of a tire during the second half. Having the group cooped up in a winter cabin stifles the action as this is the type of story that should’ve stayed permanently on the road. The contrived love angle that gets thrown in is formulaic and not believable. These two could never get along even if they wanted to. They may at some point gain a begrudging respect for the other, but to think they could cohabitate in a lasting relationship is ridiculous and besides it was the bickering between them that was entertaining and once that goes so does the movie.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: June 22, 1979

Runtime: 1Hour 49Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Howard Zieff

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Comedy, Romance, Sports Movies

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Partners (1982)

Posted on December 1, 2014 | 1 comment

partners

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Pretending to be gay.

A serial killer targeting gay men is on the prowl. When one of his victims turns out to be the son of an influential politician pressure is put on the police force to find the culprit. The police chief (Kenneth McMillan) feels he has no choice but to pair Sgt. Benson (Ryan O’Neal) a straight cop with Kerwin (John Hurt) who is a gay desk clerk at the station. They are to masquerade as a gay couple in hopes of infiltrating the gay underground and find clues to the elusive killer, but their contrasting personalities and lifestyles threaten to blow their cover before they can make headway.

This film was controversial at the time of its release for its overuse of gay stereotypes and there are indeed some especially at the beginning, but the film’s biggest offense is that it is just plain boring. The idea that two cops could be forced to pretend to be a gay couple or have one of them pose naked for the cover of a gay men’s magazine as part of their investigation is dubious enough, but had it been funny I might have forgiven it. Unfortunately this thing can’t even elicit a few chuckles.

The idea that Kerwin would automatically fall in love with Benson while working together simply because he is another man is absurd and makes about as much sense as a heterosexual male falling for every woman that he meets, which of course doesn’t happen. The Benson character is also quite callous and disrespectful to Kerwin while showing blatant homophobic tendencies and being a confirmed ladies’ man, so I didn’t see what there was about him that Kerwin would have fallen in love with anyways.

Benson’s transformation to being more sensitive to gays and their issues during the course of the story might have been more compelling had it been better written. However, his liberal use of the word ‘faggot’ makes the film seem quite dated and wouldn’t be heard in a movie today especially from a character that is supposedly a protagonist.

Hurt plays the gay caricature well, but the idea of placing someone on such a dangerous mission without having any undercover experience of even knowing how to use a gun seemed stupid and unrealistic. Out of all the characters McMillan’s comes off best and he even manages to be slightly amusing, but unfortunately isn’t seen enough. Character actors Jay Robinson and Sydney Lassick can be spotted very briefly.

This was intended to be a parody of Cruising, which was released 2 years earlier and was a much more serious and graphic look at a true life killer of gay men. That film starred Al Pacino and will be reviewed next Monday.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: April 30, 1982

Runtime: 1Hour 32Minutes

Rated R

Director: James Burrows

Studio: Paramount

Available: VHS, DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Buddy Movies, Comedy/Drama, Gay/Lesbian, Movies with Nudity, Mystery, Police Drama

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The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973)

Posted on November 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

the thief who came to dinner 3

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Detective hounds jewel thief.

Webster (Ryan O’Neal) is a bored computer programmer who has grown cynical of the business world and decides to become a modern day Robin Hood. He does so by stealing paperwork listing illegal activities of a corrupt politician (Charles Cioffi) and uses this to blackmail him into giving the addresses of his rich and equally corrupt pals. He then robs them of their jewels while with the help of a local fence (Ned Beatty) resells them and keeps half the profits. He even manages to get into a hot relationship with a beautiful woman (Jacqueline Bisset), but just as things start to click insurance investigator Dave Reilly (Warren Oates) gets on the case who’s determined to expose and nab Webster anyway he can.

The film, which was written by Walter Hill and based on a novel by Terence Lore Smith, has a slick even smug attitude about it. It has some interesting ingredients, but never really gels. Webster pulls off these robberies with such relative ease that they are barely interesting to watch. The scene where he gets rear-ended by an old lady and then chased throughout the streets of Houston when he cannot produce proper identification to the police is fun, but there needed to be more of this and the otherwise laid-back pace does not help.

the thief who came to dinner 2

Despite his good looks O’Neal is a weak leading man although here he isn’t too bad. Still the supporting cast easily upstages him especially Oates and had he been made the star this film would’ve been far better. The scene where his car breaks down while tailing O’Neal and then having O’Neal turn around to help him fix it is quite amusing as is Oates’ final act of defiance towards his superiors after he gets fired.

Austin Pendleton is quite funny as an obsessed chess player and Beatty is great as a caricature of a ‘good ole’ boy’ Texas con-man and he really deserved more screen time. Bisset is wasted, but looks beautiful as always and I really digged her ritzy, spacious house that outside of a two lamps had no furniture at all.

The production has very much of a European flair, but its sophisticated façade quickly wears thin. You keep waiting for it to catch its stride, but it never does making it fluffy and forgettable including its wide-open non-ending.

the thief who came to dinner 1

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: March 1, 1973

Runtime: 1Hour 40Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Bud Yorkin

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: VHS

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Posted in 70's Movies, Comedy, Fast Cars/Car Chase, Heist Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in Texas, Obscure Movies

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