David Zelag Goodman Archives

[Originally published in Movietone News 31, April 1974]

Man on a Swing is one of those anomalous films with a few pretensions to major standing scattered amid the telltale half-measures and slipshod surfaces of a B-picture. Exhibits A, C, and D (B having just been spoken for): Joel Grey, who was probably embarking on this film about the time he carried home a Supporting Actor Oscar for Cabaret last year; Cliff Robertson, an actor of apparent intelligence and integrity who followed up on his own Best Actor award (for Charly) by writing, producing, directing, and starring in his own modest, intriguing movie J.W. Coop, and lending himself to such commercially unlikely but very distinctive experiments as The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid; Frank Perry, onetime Brave Independent Artist who launched himself with the privately financed David and Lisa, then went on to such heav-veee projects as Last Summer, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Play It As It Lays. Doc (which was pre-Lays) marked his first excursion into genre territory—and a sour, humorless, genre- and self-debasing excursion it was. Man on a Swing indicates a slight improvement: Perry turns in unassuming, if also undistinguished, work on this story about the investigation of a sex murder in a small town firmly entrenched in Middle America.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]

Several people have assured me that Logan’s Run is a well-above-average science fiction novel; not having read it, I’m hardly about to contradict them, or attempt to blame the failure of the film version on the novelists. But as Logan’s Run dribbled out via a hasty, convenient, and not very convincing conclusion, I found myself reflecting that sf writers can get away with a lot on the printed page that moviemakers just can’t. At least until its current wave of respectability, sf put its practitioners in an economic/aesthetic bind: even a talented sf writer was faced with a shortage of time to work through his ideas and polish his narrative—gotta make a sale, buy bread and typewriter ribbon, and get on with the next one. And so you may be reading along in a sci-fi novel, find yourself turned on by the visionary or dramatic possibilities of a situation—say, 20 pages’ worth of prose—and then find yourself back in flat, uninvolving, strictly functional 10-cents-a-word narrative territory until the next intriguing passage heaves into view. A writer who has to get his character out of a tight spot can reach for his dot-dot-dot and announce a new chapter, cutting away in time and space, coming back to his character when it’s handy to do so, and trusting the casually surreal nature of the genre to soothe the savage beast of linear narrative curiosity. In a film, no way.

Tag: David Zelag Goodman

Review: Man on a Swing

Review: Logan’s Run