Author: Richard T. Jameson

Richard T. Jameson has been editor of Movietone News (1971-81) and Film Comment (1990-2000) magazines, as well as Seattle’s Queen Anne News (2003-07). A member of the National Society of Film Critics since 1980, he edited the NSFC's 1994 anthology They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres.

Tender Mercies

Written by Richard T. Jameson February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 Leave a Comment

[originally published in The Weekly, May 4, 1983]

The man has been around for some time; several days, a week — we can’t be sure. The guy he was traveling with moved on, leaving him among the cigarette butts and half-empty bottles in the clapboard country-roadside motel. Upon coming to and finding himself penniless to pay for the room, he offered to odd-job his way out of debt to the lady who operates the place. She accepted — “No drinking on the job,” though — and he stayed on. Now, one night at supper, her young son eyes him across the table and asks, “Mister, what’s yore name?”

That’s the way life gets sorted out in Tender Mercies. Nothing forced, no privileged information elicited or shoved into the foreground before its time. The characters and their collective life will not be butted and chivvied into artificial poses so that conventional rhythms of “story” can be satisfied. This drifter and the roadside lady come to care for each other (months have gone by now, we know from in-passing references in the dialogue), but we do not see them marry. We do not even see them agree to marry: He asks her whether she’s ever thought about marrying again, says he’s been thinking about it, asks if she’ll think about marrying him. She agrees to think about it. Next scene we see, schoolkids are taunting her boy, Sonny, about his mother’s new husband.

The slippage of scenes — the omission of conventional Big Scenes between scenes, as it were — does not imply that anything common-law has been allowed to develop (the lady is a good Baptist, after all; they’ve been married, legal and proper). What this narrative technique does imply is that life’s truest ceremonies are celebrated in the random minutiae of everyday experience. And that is right nextdoor to recognizing the film’s theme of “tender mercies”: that the pain of mortality, of being bound on a deathward journey whose purpose and itinerary often seem obscure, can be truly alleviated not by spectacular sunsets, exceptional interventions in the progress of existence, but rather by quiet moments of self-knowledge, of seeing oneself in perspective with one’s fellows and one’s environment, in the limpid light of day.

by Richard T. Jameson, Film Reviews, Westerns

Kevin Costner’s ‘Open Range’ delivers the goods

Written by Richard T. Jameson February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 Leave a Comment

[originally published in Queen Anne/Magnolia News, August 27, 2003]

Film critics have a lot of things on their plate when they sit down to deal with a movie, and some of those things can be pretty far removed from the concerns and curiosity of the typical reader. When you get down to basics, what most people want to know when reading about a given movie is: Am I going to enjoy it? Am I going to be satisfied that I spent two hours of my time that way?

Open Range will take slightly more than two hours of your time, and viewers who keep a stopwatch handy may not appreciate all of it, because it’s easy to imagine how the film could have been shortened, tightened up. But I wouldn’t part with a minute of it. It moves at the settled pace and with the assured stride of a national genre in a culture that values such a thing.

It’s also deeply satisfying in ways that few movies are these days. Then again, few movies these days are Westerns. Fewer still are Westerns that aspire to give the sort of pleasure that even run-of-the-mill Westerns could once be depended upon to stimulate. Open Range costars and was directed by Kevin Costner, who thirteen years ago won some Oscars for making Dances with Wolves. That movie had its virtues, and the new film is clearly the work of the same man, but a better measure of the satisfaction Open Range delivers is the movie in which Costner, as a featured actor, first connected with audiences: Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado in 1985.

Film Reviews

Review: The Great Santini

Written by Richard T. Jameson February 16, 2026February 16, 2026

[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981]

Orion’s The Great Santini has been sitting on the shelf for about a year now and seems unlikely to move off it unless pay-TV pops for it.* The second (surely there can’t be more?) directorial effort of screenwriter Lewis John Carlino (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was the first), the film seems unsalable in the present Hollywood scheme of things. It is, for one thing, a small movie, without the sort of topical hook that might lend it the opportunistic urgency to make a distribution and publicity push worthwhile. It is also a hopeless mess. Its central showpiece and only detectable raison-d’Ãªtre is Robert Duvall’s tour-de-force characterization of Marine super—fighter-pilot and congenital bad-/hardass “Bull” Meechum—an extension (whether or not it was so intended) of Duvall’s Col. Kilgore (Apocalypse Now). The film gets underway in Spain, 1962, with a demonstration of Meechum’s superior aerial tactical skills, then a demonstration of his hellraising skills at a party jointly celebrating his air team’s besting of their Navy rivals and his own transfer home to assume his first squadron command—and incidentally rejoin his devout Southern Catholic wife (Blythe Danner) and four offspring. Bawling mock-serious—but also deadly-serious—orders at the familial troops, he packs them up at 0300 hours to drive to Beaufort (that’s bewfert), S.C., and settle into his new billet. The rest of the movie enlarges on the dynamics of life in a Marine household, with especial attention being paid to the relationship of Meechum—self-styled The Great Santini—and his 18-year-old son (Michael O’Keefe). Son resents the hell out of Dad, and drops an occasional hint that he may not sign on for an obligatory four-year tour after he’s completed college (he’s currently a high-school senior); but their relationship is also fiercely loving—as, indeed, virtually all Meechum’s relationships appear to be, one way or the other.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: ‘Breakout’

Written by Richard T. Jameson February 16, 2026February 16, 2026

Richard T. Jameson's 1975 review of 'Breakout,' originally published in Movietone News 42.

[Originally published in Movietone News 42, July 1975]

They were smart to change the title from The Ten–Second Jailbreak. Even though Charles Bronson says he’s going to set his ‘copter down in the prisonyard for only ten seconds, we don’t dwell on that. If there were a title to remind us, though, we might irritably observe that minutes seem to pass by—and it’s not from suspense or Odessa-steps montage while those prison guards stare on with whuddafuck expressions on their mugs, deciding to open fire only after the whirlybird has all but made its belated exit. It must be well known to everyone who passed near a TV set during Breakout‘s opening week of summer business that this nice man who looks just like Robert Duvall has been tossed into a Mexican slammer on a trumped-up charge, and left to rot there by his business enemies, who happen to include Uncle John Huston, confirmed now in the nasty habits he picked up in Chinatown. Faithful wife Jill Ireland (who is also the faithful wife of Charles Bronson, and hence keeps working in her husband’s pictures) hires baling-wire airman Bronson to get him out somehow. Breakout isn’t nearly the offense against decency, not to mention narrative intelligence, that last summer’s saturation-promo action flick was—Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, if you’d forgot, and if you had, excuse me for bringing it up again. But Tom Gries, for whom many of us once had hopes, has unwisely decided to play most of this film as comedy, without knowing how; and if somebody says that that’s all the plot sounds worthy of, I have to point out that comedy doesn’t just happen automatically when melodrama trips over its absurdities—not comedy consistent enough to carry a whole movie. The actors are noticeably stranded by Gries’s decision and only Sheree North comes near wresting an integral characterization out of the mélange.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

‘Annie Hall’ – How the Woodman’s World Got Larger

Written by Richard T. Jameson November 8, 2025November 8, 2025

[Originally published in The Weekly (Seattle), May 1977]

Annie Hall is far and away the best movie Woody Allen has made. Much more importantly, it’s good and rich and satisfying in terms that, heretofore, have had only negative reference to Allen’s film career, demarcating the limits of his scope as a writer-director-star.

The picture was called Woody Allen Film throughout its two-year conception and realization—a title that made all-too-perfect sense with regard to the trajectory his filmmaking has been describing. With the qualified exception of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…, all Allen’s films have flaunted his personal centrality as pretender to the throne of Chaplin, Keaton, or whomever you happen to uphold as the comic star-auteur par excellence. Their cast lists abound in interesting players whose actual participation often amounts to nothing more than a walk-on; very few—Gene Wilder in Sex, Jessica Harper in the weird Persona parody just before the end of Love and Death—have managed to register decisively enough to be retained on the retina of memory the next day or, indeed, as long as the film itself lasts.

Film Reviews, Westerns

Review: The Electric Horseman

Written by Richard T. Jameson September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

Horse comes over the horizon and slants down into the golden valley, right there I figure Sydney Pollack auteur time, whoa up. I mean, if Sydney Pollack can be an auteur, it isn’t worth being one. But he wants it, oh, he can taste it. He cranes, he tracks, he dissolves. (They shoot auteurs, don’t they?) All right, enough funnin’, let’s fess up and concede that after enough films get made and enough thematic and syntactical evidence piles up, there gets to be somebody there you can recognize, and that’s Sydney Pollack. The guy has a style. Whether that style has much to do with style in the richest, most analytical and mystical senses of the word is another question. But a style he has: slick, thin; getting to be rather touching in its naive pretentiousness; suited to keeping movies moving, and hence giving his films a leg up when it comes down to the competitive question of which movie should I go to, which film in the local triple or sextuple shopping-mall cinema is likeliest to keep me entertained. Entertained, goddam it, not edified, no matter how much the entertainer may strive to be taken for an edifier as well. The Electric Horseman entertains better than almost anything else that’s twinkled onto the scene this Christmas season. The key factors in this–gorgeous, adorable, intelligent, watchably changeable, iconically constant factors–are a couple of stars who would have been stars even when the Hollywood firmament was filled with them. REDFORD : FONDA : ELECTRIC say the ads. Believe them. And this time believe Sydney Pollack, too.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: ‘The Three Days of the Condor’

Written by Richard T. Jameson September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 45, November 1975]

Even the most casual glancer at the credits is going to smirk at the fact that The Three Days of the Condor is taken from a book called The Six Days of the Condor; a certain suspense factor tied up with significantly designated slices of time is distinctly compromised before the action can get underway. That difficulty aside, the movie version is not only twice as fast-paced as the book but also approximately 600% improved. Literarily, James Grady’s novel is sufficient to make Frederick Forsyth look like Graham Greene by comparison, and Sydney Pollack and his screenwriters have wisely compressed the itinerary of Condor—the code name of a CIA-employed reader and analyst of spy, mystery, and adventure novels who goes out to lunch one rainy noon and returns to find his utterly innocuous section totally “damaged” (everybody has been machine-gunned) by, just maybe, another CIA faction. Indeed, Pollack jams the plot past so fast that I wonder whether nonreaders of the book will be able to follow its every turn, especially when (Altmania again) key clues and crucial awakenings on the part of one character or another are often thrown away in a stepped-on line of dialogue or murmured soliloquy.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Great Waldo Pepper

Written by Richard T. Jameson September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 43, September 1975]

I just realized I can’t remember how the line begins, so I’m going to fake it: “Technicians provide realism—artists supply truth.” “Technicians” almost certainly wasn’t the word but the rest is legitimate as a quote. A Hollywood director says it to Waldo Pepper, who was just too late to do his stuff as an ace in the Great War and now has a job, under a phony name, as a stunt flyer for the early talkies. Pepper has just pointed out that the wrong planes are being used by the movie squadron, which happens to be reenacting the legendary air battle he knows by heart and hearkens back to in support of his personal romantic code. George Roy Hill has left himself a lot of loopholes, as usual: The director who delivers the line is, or at least would be in many imaginable circumstances, right to prefer poetic truth to the documentary variety. But he’s wrong within the emotional context of the film, and he’s pompous and defensive to boot. But Waldo’s righteousness is somewhat compromised by our memory that he more or less opened the film by laying down a verbal account of the original battle, fascinating both his immediate, Nebraska farm family audience and its counterpart out there in the darkened theater, winning them and us with a charming blend of self-effacing softspokenness and ingenuous egoism, and shortly thereafter was exposed as a fraud for having cast himself in the story at all. But Hill implicitly tipped us to that particular con by preceding his Technicolor movie proper with monochrome archive stills showing aviation heroes giving up the ghost while stunting for movie cameras; this, plus our association of Robert Redford and Hill with that earlier, supposedly pleasurable screwing-over The Sting—similarly punctuated by (painted) illustrations of a movie crew filming con artists in their maneuvers—surely constituted some kind of fair warning.

by Richard T. Jameson, Film Reviews

Sublimities in transit: Steven Spielberg dreams another American Dream

Written by Richard T. Jameson September 11, 2025September 19, 2025 Leave a Comment

[Originally published in Queen Anne News / Magnolia News, June 23, 2004]

Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) is in a bad place.

Flying into an airport that is never referred to as JFK even though that’s what it must be, he has traveled from his homeland of Krakozia, a suppositional satellite of the former Soviet Union, to New York City, U.S.A., on a personal, undisclosed mission. Unbeknownst to Viktor, while his plane was in the air his country has been whisked out of diplomatically accredited existence by a small, messy, yet effective revolution. Hence, he finds himself in an intractable limbo between the debarkation gate and the portals to America.

His passport is invalid, his return plane ticket useless. He can’t go on; he can’t go back. Inconveniently for the beleaguered bureaucrat, Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), charged with monitoring international comings and going at the terminal, neither can he be made to go away.

Whereupon director Steven Spielberg sums up the situation with a patented tour-de-force shot. Viktor walks through the International Arrivals concourse to the verge of its public core and stops; then the camera cranes back and up, pulling away from our central character — and very identifiable star — as hundreds of travelers and airport personnel teem through several layers and at least an acre of glass-walled corridors, gift shops, bookstores (Borders!) and grab-a-bite eateries, till only a sheer act of will enables us to keep track of where Viktor’s dim, distant, and helpless figure stands.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Zandy’s Bride

Written by Richard T. Jameson March 8, 2025March 8, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 34, August 1974]

It may be a peculiarity of my character that a little of Jan Troell’s unassumingness goes a very long way. There’s something very admirable—and certainly “grownup,” to anyone passionately concerned that the movies grow away from Melodrama and towards Life—about his talent for capturing the offhand beauties of a field, a rock, the picturesque yet undecorative angle from which the whimsy, at once gentle and profound, of a pregnant woman indulging in her last reverie on a swing is observed and defined. The New Land begins (at least, as it is shown in this country) with a slow, obscurely motivated zoom-out from a deep stand of trees somewhere in 19th-century Minnesota, the sound of … an axe? a gun? a wheel? … reverberating within. Anything could be happening there—something surely seems to be happening there—and in its own good time the land and the film may reveal that something to us.