Tag: Carmine Caridi

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 10, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband is a private party that never gets off the ground for the characters or the audience, although it may have been lotsa laughs for the people who made it. I haven’t read Dan Greenburg’s “sex novel” or his autobiography of sex-play, Scoring, or anything else but a couple of similarly oriented pieces (I mean…) in Playboy; but this movie has nothing new to tell anyone about why friendly couples swap or don’t swap, and there’s nothing new about the way that nothing is related to us. The main characters, with the probable exception of Andrew Duncan’s stuffy lab type, are fairly sympathetic, but the performances are klutzy in a like-us-because-we’re-klutzy way that has worn out its welcome by now, considering how many non-actors and non-directors figure they can get by on it. The situation: two couples take a vacation home for the season on Martha’s Vineyard where they encounter the new marital morality at one of a series of institutionalized parties and gingerly play at bringing the game home with them. Comfortable friendship and the sanctity of marriage prevail in the end, as far as the main characters are concerned, while the screenwriter and producers stroke each other off by taking walk-on (but much-discussed) parts as the local swingers of record. A home movie all the way.
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by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Gambler (2)

Written by Kathleen Murphy August 11, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 38, January 1975]

The Gambler is a curiously cerebral film in which the play of ideas (particularly literary assessments of the American experience) is transferred from the incestuous séance of the academic seminar to green baize gambling tables. There, those ideas are raised, not as ghosts, but as the highest stakes a man can wager. In California Split Robert Altman used gambling as an excuse for getting at the marginalia, the milieu, rather than as a metaphysical metaphor. Director Karel Reisz and screenwriter James Toback (a professor of English) are clearly after bigger fish—say, about the size of Moby Dick. For like Ahab, Reisz’s gambler bets on himself, his own power or will, to make some impression, to impose some meaning on … what? Perhaps that which resists will: fate or chance, the existential territory that refuses to be enfeoffed by the central “I-am.”

Review: The Gambler (1)

Written by Rick Hermann August 10, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 38, January 1975]

James Caan has graduated from the half-wit college boy of Coppola’s The Rain People right into a professorship at NYCC in his latest picture, Karel Reisz’ heavyhanded non-exploration into the befuddled and befuddling id of a compulsive gambler which ultimately becomes knotted up in its own tangle of 19th century existentialism and carelessly applied Nietzschean superman metaphysics. Somehow I was more convinced by Caan’s gentle inarticulateness in Coppola’s movie than I was by the cutely masochistic cool he sardonically exudes in The Gambler, and although he’s still impaling women against walls (shades of The Godfather) and strutting about with the typical Caan machismo which fails to be tempered by his role as a teacher in Reisz’s film, the character of Axei Freed lacks some of the gritty credibility which Caan was able to give to the role of gangster Sonny Corleone. Which may not be so much Caan’s fault as that of Reisz and screenwriter Toback who, instead of trying to develop their character from the bottom up, begin in some metaphysical realm far above his head and pigeonhole his personality in a framework of neatly defined psychological concepts, with the result that Caan’s character reads like a textbook case rather than reminds us of a man.